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About Me

Preface Thoughts, possible choices, decisions.
The natural progression when deciding in which manner you want to play this game, that although old still have a special charm in it. Allow me to take you onto a journey that you will soon forget or dismiss: Why you should consider, or be pleased about, the decision of joining our ranks within the rogue class. My nickname is Soyoen, I have close to exclusively been playing as a rogue since the closed beta back in 2004 with a few breaks in between - this is my way to provide understanding of the rogue class in the original version of World of Warcraft.
Table of content 1. The Rogue
1.1 Choosing the race
1.1.1 Alliance
1.1.1.1 Dwarf
1.1.1.2 Gnome
1.1.1.3 Human
1.1.1.4 Night Elf
1.1.2 Horde
1.1.2.1 Orc
1.1.2.2 Troll
1.1.2.3 Undead
1.2 Road to the level cap
1.3 The class at the level cap
1.4 Preparing for your first raid
1.4.1 Consumables for your first raid
1.4.2 Enchants
1.4.3 Addons
1.4.4 Keybindings
1.5 What can a rogue roughly expect to do in a set of boss battles
1.5.1 Molten Core: Gehennas
1.5.2 Molten Core: Ragnaros
1.5.3 Blackwing Lair: Vaelastrasz the Corrupt
1.5.4 Blackwing Lair: Chromaggus
1.5.5 Zul'Gurub: High priestess Mar'li
1.5.6 Zul'Gurub: Jin'do the Hexxer
1.5.7 The Temple of Ahn'qiraj: Princess Huhuran
1.5.8 The Temple of Ahn'qiraj: C'thun
1.6 Special consumables
2. The important basic mechanics 2.1 Getting rid of misses on yellow attacks 2.2 Rotations & cycles 2.2.1 Rotations 2.2.2 Cycles 2.3 Cooldown management 3. The important advanced mechanics 3.1 Weapon skill 3.1.1 What is it? 3.1.2 Why do I need to have knowledge about it? 3.2 Proc chance & Proc per minute 3.2.1 What is it? 3.2.2 Why is it important to have knowledge about? 3.2.3 Actual PPM 4. Min-maxing insights 4.1 Extra attacks and swing timers 4.1.1 How do they work? 4.1.2 Why is this important to know? 4.2 The task of damage dealers 5. RogueDPS Reborn spreadsheet
The Rogue 1.1 Choosing the race Something as trivial as making the initial choice of what race you wish to play can have substantial effect on your ability to compete in end game content as a rogue, whilst impact your final gearing process. An initial statement on the matter is that Horde rogues will have higher DPS thresholds than their Alliance counterparts in raid environments, whilst still sporting superior racial abilities for PVP environments. 1.1.1 Alliance The experience as a rogue on Alliance in terms of PVE will greatly vary in contrast to that of Horde due to having access to blessings instead of totems. Threat will usually be a non-issue in raids and you will need to work a lot harder than other rogues in order to stand out in a raid setting. 1.1.1.1 Dwarf The Dwarves matches their counterparts in Gnomes and Night elves in terms of pure PVE performance. They also have access to Stoneform, which upon activation provides vital immunity against poison effects such as Blind, Serpent sting and likewise making Dwarves one of the top choices for players interested in mainly PVP. 1.1.1.2 Gnome Like the Dwarves you’ll find Gnomes on equal footing in terms of PVE performance. Instead of Stoneform the player will have access to Escape Artist, which allows the player to remove any immobilization or movement impairing effect and makes Gnomes one of the top choices for players interested in mainly PVP. 1.1.1.3 Human The Human race stands out in regards to the rest in pure PVE performance on Alliance due to their racial abilities providing weapon skill, which will be covered more in a later chapter. They also have access to perception, which greatly increases stealth detection upon activation. Humans are the top choice on Alliance if you are interested in hardcore raiding and min-maxing. 1.1.1.4 Night Elf Night elves will provide the greatest benefit in PVE performance of the non-human alliance rogues due to higher innate agility, albeit the differences are minor between the non-human races. In terms of PVP performance night elves have one extra stealth level from shadowmeld, which funny enough will provide greater benefit farming frozen runes in Naxxramas than what it will in a PVP setting. They do however have the best attack animations on Alliance. 1.1.2 Horde The experience as a rogue on Horde in terms of PVE is highly affected by totems and the shaman class in general. Windfury is a superb weapon buff that you will build your playstyle around, whilst constantly having to keep track of your threat levels among other things. In a raid setting it will be a lot easier to differentiate between rogues and a really good rogue with subpar gear can match an average or poor rogue with good gear. 1.1.2.1 Orc Orcs have access to Blood Fury which will prove useful in both PVE and PVP alike, whilst also sporting extra stun resistance that is godly for various PVP situations. This is the race you choose if you want to PVP on Horde and perform well in raids. 1.1.2.2 Troll Trolls have access to Berserking which will mainly be useful in PVE situations. Looking further they also have the best baseline stats for a rogue on the Horde faction, making them a perfect race if you are truly looking towards hardcore raiding and min-maxing. They are however very weak in PVP in contrast to both Orc and Undead, so choose with caution. 1.1.2.3 Undead The weakest of the bunch on Horde in terms of pure PVE performance, however still very useful in PVP and leveling with Will of the Forsaken and Cannibalize. Generally, the most popular race for rogues on Horde with the best attack animations in the game (Undead Female). 1.2 Road to the level cap The leveling experience as a rogue differ from the majority of the other classes, due to the stealth ability that enables you to skip through packs of non player characters (NPCs). You will quickly learn to mash that sinister strike or backstab button, and realize just how easy crowd control can ruin your day. As you approach level 24, I would recommend a talent distribution like the one that can be found in the picture below. The road afterwards would either be invested towards relentless strikes in the assassination tree, weapon expertise in the combat tree or opportunity and beyond in the subtlety tree.
Backstab will be one of your most valuable abilities early on in the game as you can sidestep "through" NPCs, and as the NPC is always facing you, eventual delay will make you able to backstab the NPC if you quickly repeat the sidestep. On some server projects this is a lot harder to pull off but when you get a hang of it, in terms of spamming your backstab button, your leveling pace will pick up momentum.
Key talents for leveling speed are Remorseless Attacks, Ruthlessness, Relentless Strikes, Improved Sinister Strike, Precision, Improved Backstab, Riposte, Blade Flurry, Weapon Expertise, Master of Deception, Opportunity, Ghostly Strike, Serrated Blades, Preparation and Dirty Deeds. Obviously some of these will be more suited for a more hostile environment whilst others focus more on a strict PvE environment.
Notable leveling dungeons that feature good gear for rogues to ease up the leveling phase are: Ragefire Chasm, The Deadmines, Blackfanthom Depths, Gnomeregan, Scarlet Monastery, Razorfen Downs, Maraudon, and Blackrock Depths. 1.3 The class at the level cap When you have finally reached the level cap a new chapter begins in this version of World of Warcraft; the gathering of your preraid best in slot items. As time progresses and more items and quest chains are unlocked, it becomes easier to obtain great items to put you right into the social mess of raiding. Great rogues are always in demand but hard to find, and in this version of World of Warcraft rogues have one of the more action packed roles.
In Dungeons up to 10 men you can expect to aid your group with crowd control and out of combat pack control with abilities such as sap, gouge, blind, and distract. When progressing up to 20 man raids you will still make use of the same abilities on certain packs, but it becomes more of a wipe recovery and/or avoidance maneuver - with that said if you manage to pull out key distracts and/or likewise that enables your raid group to survive a potential wipe then you have created good value for the team.
In 40 man raids your job is more one dimensional; Maximum damage per second (DPS) at all times WITHOUT screwing up kicks, rotations, positioning, and likewise. As Ghostcrawler once said: "the class is ultimately very mathy", and makes for a perfect fit for eventual players who want to tryhard and pull out some extra chunks of DPS. The rogue class is easy to learn, hard to master and one of the most rewarding classes in a PVE environment - especially if you are playing Horde with access to windfury totems. 1.4 Preparing for your first raid 1.4.1 Consumables for your first raid Looking away from obtaining your best in slot preraid gear you will need to prepare a few other things in order to ease up your ability to perform. Mongoose potions, Juju power, and winterfall firewater are all great ways of boosting your DPS. However for your very first raid it shouldn't be the focal point as protection potions and likewise may provide greater aid to your raidgroup by easing up the job of the healers. If money is low and you can only sustain defensive potions I recommend looking at DPS boosting potions one tier below mongoose potions. 1.4.2 Enchants Something you most definitely should have on your gear when entering your first raid are enchants, and more specifically the weapon enchants in terms of crusader on your main hand weapon slot combined with either crusader or agility on the offhand. This is due to crusader providing so much more as a single enchant then most other ingame at the main hand weapon slot and is thus very worthwhile to acquire, especially if you team up with another rogue/druid in order to farm Archivist Galford for righteous orbs. Aside from this, all enchants that provide agility would do good before your first raid BUT crusader on the main hand should have priority. 1.4.3 Addons There will be a set of required addons to use for your first raid, usually your guild has their own KTM threat meter and a few other addons they require you to use. I however will give you what you really need to hit the ground running, the list below will provide you with good possibilities of creating a very functional and clean raiding UI. Some of the addons may requires ACE2, prat is also a very useful addon but not completely in my taste.
BearCastBar: Swing timers combined with a new Cast bar. Superb for Windfury users.
BigWigs: Boss addon that is commonly used to track certain abilities, combine with NECB.
NECB: Addon that tracks enemies and has a built in boss addon, combine with BigWigs.
Bongos: Easy to use for setting up your bars.
Buffalo: Tracking buffs and debuffs, easy to use and nice looking.
Chronometer: Every rogues favorite CD/SND tracker.
Classic Snowfall: Instant button pushes.
ShaguPlates: Improve the ingame nameplates to actually look good.
EnergyWatch_V2: Combine with LUNA.
KTM Threat meter: To keep track of the threat on intensive fights.
LunaUnitFrames: The best unit frames addon in vanilla.
SimpleMinimap: Improving the visuals on the minimap.
Stunwatch: Keeping track of stuns and likewise in dungeons & 20mans.
SWStats: Your favorite raiding addon.
Tinytip: UI Improvement.
XLoot: Improves loot window.
1.4.4 Keybindings The following abilities and consumables are recommended to be easy accessible when you start raiding: Sinister strike, Slice'n'dice, Eviscerate, Backstab, Kick, Evasion, Sprint, Vanish, Adrenaline rush, Blade flurry, Distract, Feint, Thistle tea, Greater X protection potion, Free action potion, Instant poison, and Bandages. My recommendation is that you make a priority list for yourself of what you value the most as everyone has a different way of playing, and then doing the binds in whichever order suits your needs. I've highlighted some abilities in the list above that are actually crucial in vanilla content. 1.5 What can a rogue roughly expect to do in a set of boss battles 1.5.1 Molten Core: Gehennas The boss fight against Gehennas is a easy fight to learn and hard to get right due to its duration. At the maximum level you will use a free action potion before the first aoe stuns come out from the two adds, while pulling out a perfect rotation to cleave the adds down in combination with the boss. In speedruns it can be common to pull the next pack before the boss is dead, so minimizing the damage taken from rain of fire is crucial to your raid groups speed. 1.5.2 Molten Core: Ragnaros In the last fight within the Molten Core you face of against Ragnaros, the key to perform well on this fight is to time eventual knockbacks. On some servers this is a harder thing to achieve, without the movement speed buff from the boots enchant it should take approx 3.3-3.6sec to run clear from the aoe blast. If the DPS in your raid group doesn't cut it and the sons of flame make an appearence it is your job together with a tank to deal with the non controlled sons. 1.5.3 Blackwing Lair: Vaelastrasz the Corrupt This is the best fight in the game for any and every rogue, unless your tanks doesn't do enough threat per second - in which case it kinda blows. "Infinite" amount of energy will make backstab the go to build on this encounter, and if you are usually using swords I recommend using the build posted in the picture below. On this fight you are guaranteed threat issues and will especially if Horde, utilize feint to reduce your threat in the beginning 20-25s of the fight. Remember: Even if vanish doesn't clear your threat on KTM or likewise, it is still cleared.
1.5.4 Blackwing Lair: Chromaggus One of the longer fights pre AQ and Naxxramas, on this fight you need to perfect the rotations you are using whilst utilizing both grenades and likewise to maximize your damage during the nature and fire weaknesses. To this you also need to make sure you gain the best possible uptime between the breaths without risking eating one, in short it's a game of uptimes. 1.5.5 Zul'Gurub: High priestess Mar'li Aside from the obvious of providing a good chunk of DPS, you will need to provide kick assistance on the drain life ability whilst making sure that no adds grow to large. In contrast to the bat boss within the same raid, kicking isn't as important here but it will speed up your raid speed by a bit if your raid DPS is low. 1.5.6 Zul'Gurub: Jin'do the Hexxer Against Jin'do the Hexxer your main job is to kill the totems, totems, and totems. Whenever the totems stop dying you will shortly experience a wipe so your job is crucial on this encounter. Looking further into the encounter you can ease up the skeletons spawning with Stratholme Holy Water to ease up the job for other players within your raid group. 1.5.7 The Temple of Ahn'qiraj: Princess Huhuran Welcome to AQ40, you will now stack tons of nature resistance in order to "soak" the aoe damage Huhuran spits out every now and then. Make sure to bring extra protection potions as you'll need them for lateron in the raid. 1.5.8 The Temple of Ahn'qiraj: C'thun At C'thun your role is to kill your assigned eye tentacle whenever it spawns whilst keeping your distance to the players around you. To ease up the work of healers and likewise you will drink a green liquid goo every 2 minutes (Greater Nature protection potion). 1.6 Special consumables There are several consumables that will help boost your ability to perform well in raids, top tier rogues love to keep thistle tea on a constant cooldown whilst having a stocks of both free action potions and restorative potions. Engineering items such as grenades (Dark Iron BomB / Thorium Grenade / Dense dynamite) and Goblin Sapper Charge make for good use throughout raids. We can of course not forget the special JuJu items such as Flurry that can give a decent boost on longer encounters. The important basic mechanics 2.1 Getting rid of misses on yellow attacks Something that you can't avoid is the unavoidable dodge chance every boss have which sits at the baseline of 5% and can scale up depending on the difference between your weapon skill and the defense skill of the NPC. What can be taken care of though is the chance to miss on yellow attacks. Acquiring between [7-9] in hit including talents will make sure that you never miss a yellow attack, of course weapon skill does have an impact on the amount of hit required. 2.2 Rotations & cycles 2.2.1 Rotations Using correct and adaptable rotations is a very effective way to increase your DPS without obtaining better gear. Rotations are in most senses fluid: Knowing when the time is right to use SND over Eviscerate and vice versa, how to handle excess combo points coming in from ruthlessness or adapting after relentless strikes fail to recover the energy cost of a finisher is vital for your performance in both dungeons and raids. The moment you stop planning ahead is often the moment you start performing worse, personally I much prefer the rotations I’ve put forward in the RogueDPS Reborn spreadsheet which you can find at the end of the post. 2.2.2 Cycles DPS cycles used by different specs and rotations has been widely debated over the years in the rogue vanilla community. From what I've seen there have been several individuals over the years stating that the dagger spec theoretically has the best possible DPS output. This is far from the truth, but yet in some cases the actual truth: For if you are playing a night elf, gnome or dwarf your endgame BIS weapons will both be daggers. Yet every other race, Alliance or Horde, will instead prefer Gressil and The Hungering Cold. Using daggers is not in any way vastly subpar throughout the game, it just needs correct itemization and talent choices in order to truly shine. As Horde though, you’d have to fight hard in order to abandon the Windfury procs from slower high damage weapons such as Swords. 2.3 Cooldown management Managing your cooldowns throughout raids and dungeons will be crucial for both your performance and the speed of the raid. My only advice to how to improve this is to plan your raid ahead. Think about at what packs you want/can use cooldowns and when you need to save them for later usages. Zul'Gurub is a very good example when it comes to how valuable cooldowns can be to have at the ready due to the constant fear of asspulls. However, looking at the other end of the spectrum in terms of min-maxing, you will need to identify bottlenecks throughout the dungeon/raid where your cooldown usage will prove to provide more benefit to the raid than on other locations. The important advanced mechanics 3.1 Weapon skill 3.1.1 What is it? I've mentioned weapon skill several times in the topic and I have yet gone into detail to what it really is and why you need to have some basic knowledge of it. To make this as easy explainable as possible: You are a fourth grader (max level) in the South Park elementary school whilst PC Principal (level 63) is the boss you need to take down. Now obviously there are some physical differences between you and Mr. PC Principal, and those differences affect your chance to have a successful punch at the boss. Aside from that; since Mr. PC Principal has awesome physique 40% of your blows doesn't quite hurt him as much as they should if you were hitting, say, Kyle. 3.1.2 Why do I need to have knowledge about it? Those 40% blows are called glancing blows in World of Warcraft and have a reduced damage output when attacking NPCs with a higher defense skill than you have weapon skill. You can reduce the damage reduction by collecting items or talents that increase your weapon skill, or if we connect it to Mr. PC Principal by sending in a Horde of pregnant Mexicans. The weapon skill system is substantial to your DPS, but luckily rogues get +5 on pretty much every weapon skill by talents which ease up everything by a ton. This makes it so that instead of your glancing blows hitting Mr. PC Principal for ~65% of your original weapon damage, they now hit him for ~85% with ~15% left to "collect" by amassing weapon skill into your favor.
There are a couple of formulas that are currently being used by different private servers: Old Nostalrius used Athan's formula which was compiled with thousands of hits by Athan et al. back in the day and provided a solid empirical ground to stand on, Kronos are currently using a low end/high end variant where glancing blow damage can't exceed normal damage by amassing Weapon Skill (LE/HE, Limit 0,9999...) which could finally be confirmed by looking at small amounts of data from NPCs 4 levels above the player, other servers use either the LE/HE version with a limit around 95% of normal damage or a very simple linear formula. The LE/HE formulas lose their gain past 308 weapon skill, the linear formulas lose their gain past 310 weapon skill, Athan's formula loses it's gain past 315 weapon skill: Gear/Talent according to relevant formula. 3.2 Proc chance & Proc per minute 3.2.1 What is it? Many items in this version of World of Warcraft have certain chance to do a special event in terms of a damage spell, extra attack, attack speed bonus, or likewise. Sword specialization is a good example of a static proc chance, the same applies for hand of justice. There are other items however that doesn't list a certain proc chance like Vis'kag the Bloodletter, or Ironfoe. These items are calculated using a proc per minute (PPM) type of system which uses the following calculation: (PPM) / (60/Weapon speed) = Proc chance. 3.2.2 Why is it important to have knowledge about? Because things aren't as obvious as they sometimes seem to be, PPM type of systems doesn't work well enough in this version of World of Warcraft to control how many times an item can proc for someone playing the rogue class. The reason for this is that a majority of our attacks are instant attacks that work to artificially boost our PPM rate by providing more attacks than thought of. This brings me into the next topic. 3.2.3 Actual PPM Actual PPM is how many procs you gain under a minute after you've been using attack speed altering effects, alot of instant attacks whilst getting a few windfury/sword specialization/hand of justice procs. Ebon Hand, as example, has a PPM set at 2,0869 (assuming Blizzard values), with the actual PPM rising to almost the double in the main hand. I need to state clearly that PPM and actual PPM are two different entities of gaining understanding around the rogue class, hence why I included it here to give you something to think about. Min-maxing insights 4.1 Extra attacks and swing timers 4.1.1 How do they work? To answer this we need to differentiate between procs from main hand attacks, offhand attacks and instant attacks. Main hand attacks that proc an extra attack will not have any impact on the swing timer, period. Offhand attacks that proc an extra attack will have the extra attack performed by the main hand whilst resetting the main hand swing timer. Instant attacks that proc an extra attack will see the attack performed from the main hand and reset the main hand swing timer, patch indications of this can be found from 2.1.1 and 2.1.2 but obviously there are other earlier sources available as well. In the picture below you will find an example of the alleged proc sequence of extra attacks:
4.1.2 Why is this important to know? The value of extra attacks will be greatly reduced if you do not play your part and play this knowledge to your advantage. If you conduct an instant attack late into the main hand swing timer and acquire a proc, you will lose much of the benefit of that free extra attack as the main hand swing timer will reset. If you instead time your instant attacks to the moment after your swing timer resets you will gain much more benefit from said extra attacks. It is therefore of vital importance when min-maxing to know when your swing timers will reset, when you can expect a proc to occur, and how you can act to make sure this information benefits you the most. This is especially true to Horde players and windfury users as they are subject to more extra attacks, many of which that for a short moment of time will increase the AP of the character – oh how I do love the vanilla design sometimes. 4.2 The task of damage dealers In essence the role of any damage dealer is to save time for the entire raid and if you do happen to die at regular pulls when no one else is dying, you are very quickly becoming less valuable for the raid to maintain. Being a damage dealer is in the general case not as appreciated as being a great tank or a superb healer: Because how can any individual understand, experience and acknowledge that you alone can save the raid 2-5 seconds per minute depending on your performance? The effect of your hard work becomes easier to materialize when you compare a group that performs poorly to a group that performs well: You do not need to only improve yourself, but others around you as well. In the end a raid can have great tanks and superb healers, but they will still remain in Molten Core for over two hours if their damage dealers are not (which is often the case). The opposite is surely true as well: A raid can have great damage dealers but poor tanks and healers, so they will remain in Molten Core for quite some time. RogueDPS Reborn spreadsheet I have for the majority of my time within the vanilla rogue community maintained my own sheets that I based around attribute input to make things a bit easier to get a grip on. In the beginning of 2015 I thought about releasing my sheets but decided that the user experience with some of them would simply be horrible. I went on and made a new sheet from the ground up taking the best bits from my previous sheets and one entry from the classical RogueDPS sheet that I cleaned up and modified to make it easier to overlook, which since late 2016 has been redesigned to deal with the implementation of the Seal Fate talent. Since the release of the spreadsheet I've seen over 12000 unique downloads from mediafire alone and I have continued to improve the spreadsheet since. It is my pleasure to introduce to you RogueDPS Reborn, which can be found in the link below, may it serve you well when arguing over wellfare epics
Mediafire: http://www.mediafire.com/download/yfrdb4a34sxius3/RogueDPS_Reborn_by_Soyoen.xlsx
Ending words If there is something that I want you to take with you from what I've posted above, or on your coming journey as a rogue then it is this the following; Be happy that you decided to roll a rogue, respect the rotations and any race works for a rogue who got the will to try hard enough. Finally, I've revamped parts of the guide and added a new chapters, I remain excited for the classic wow and look forward to discussions of mechanics as the its reality move closer to eventual release.
All the best champs
Soyoen

Hi,
you probably don't know me. My name is Shagu and I'm in vanilla addon development since end of 2013.
I'd like to introduce you a new project I'm working on for about half a year.
For me, it's an educational project to learn as much as possible about Vanilla 1.12.1 Wow-API.
The Addon aimes to be a full replacement for the original Wow interface.
The design is highly inspired by TukUI and ElvUI (which I never used) as well as several other screenshots,
I found around the web during the last 10 years.
It's completely written from scratch without any inclusion of 3rd party addons or libraries.
It's not an addon-pack like ShaguUI, which means that no external Addons will be included.
There will be support for external addons like MobHealth3 and HealComm, but they won't shipped within the package. pfUI is still under heavy development so please report all bugs and errors in the Bugtracker.
Feature-Requests might not be processed right now (but feel free to ask for it).Commands
/pfui Open the configuration GUI
/gm Open the ticket Dialog
/rl Reload the whole UI Languages
pfUI will support and contain language specific code for the following languages.
- English (enUS)
- French (frFR) [translators required]
- German (deDE)
- Chinese (zhCN) [translators required]
- Russian (ruRU) [translators required]Screenshots
Recommended Addons- DPSMate - HealComm - WIM - MobHealth3DownloadWebsite // Github // DownloadInstallation
- Download from Github as Zip, unpack and rename the folder pfUI-master to pfUI.
- Copy "pfUI" to Wow-Directory\Interface\AddOns
- Make sure to have the file "Wow-Directory\Interface\AddOns\pfUI\pfUI.toc"
- Restart WowFAQ- What does "pfUI" stand for?
The term "pfui!" is german and simply stands for "pooh!", because I'm not a big fan of creating configuration UI's especially not via the Wow-API (you might have noticed that in ShaguUI). - How can I checkout the current state?
See Installation Section. But be aware that things might not work for you. - When will it be ready?
I have no idea and no timeline yet. I'm working on it whenever I have motivation. - Why do I get lots of LUA Errors?
Please disable all addons beside pfUI and check if you still get error messages. If the messages are gone, check one addon after the other and report conflicting addons in the Bugtracker. - How can I donate?
You can't. I'm doing that for fun. Enjoy! - How can I contribute?
Report LUA-Errors and Issues in the Bugtracker.
I hope you like it. If I forgot to mention something or you have any questions, feel free to ask.
Cheers,
Shagu

_________ THE ARROW AND YOU _________
Here is a few guidelines/tips/tricks you can use in order to improve yourself as a Hunter in vanilla.
If you feel the need to chime in and cover some ground, of which I'm sure that I've missed, feel free to do so! I’m open minded for all questions and suggestions regarding the guide and I will gladly hear them out. You can contact me on Crestfall's discord channel or on Crestfall's forum via PM's or by commenting on this thread.
Table Of Contents 1. Main Attributes & Stat Values 1.1 Main Attributes
1.2 Stat Values 2. BIS Gear & Enchants 2.1 Horde BIS List - Current Patch
2.2 Alliance BIS List - Current Patch 3. Consumables & Buffs 3.1 World Buffs
3.2 Damage Increasing Consumables & Buffs
3.3 Damage Increasing Pet Consumables & Buffs
3.4 Sustainability Consumables & Buffs
3.5 Situational Consumables & Buffs 4. Races & Racial Abilities 4.1 Racial Stats
4.2 Racial Abilities
4.3 Race Of Choice 5. Talent Builds 5.1 Recommended Talent Builds
5.2 Experimental Talent Builds 6. Pets & Pet Abilities 6.1 Pet Of Choice
6.2 Pet Abilities 7. Rotations & Cooldowns 7.1 Simplified Rotation
7.2 Explanation Of The Hunter Rotations
7.3 "Cycles Are Impossible To Use"
7.4 Lag And Human Reaction Invalidate Cycle Calculations
7.5 Aimed Shot Will Be Catching Up To Your Multi-Shot
7.6 Cooldown Management 8. Addons
9. Macros
10. Links & Downloads
_________ MAIN ATTRIBUTES & STAT VALUES _________
1.1 - Main Attributes Agility
Increases attack power with melee weapons by 1 and ranged weapons by 2
Increases your crit chance by 0.0189% (1% crit per 52.91 Agility)
Increases Armor by 2 and Dodge by 0,0377% (1% dodge per 26.5 Agility)
Strength
Increases attack power with melee weapons by 1.
Stamina
Increases health points by 10 per point.
Intellect
Increases mana points by 15 per point and the rate at which weapon skills improve.
Spirit
Increases health & mana regeneration rates.
1.2 - Stat Values The stat values below will differentiate depending on your current stats, talents and target defensive stats so because of that I've made 4 examples that you can use.
The examples are all specced as 20/31/00 and are fully buffed except for world buffs and shaman/paladin buffs. The gear can be viewed in the spreadsheet linked in the BIS section. The target is a lvl 63 dragonkin mob type with 5 sunder armor debuffs.
Patch 1.5 BIS (T1)
10 AP = 1.38 DPS
1 Crit = 3.72 DPS
1 Crit = 26.95 AP
1 AP = 0,0371% Crit
Patch 1.9 BIS (T2)
10 AP = 1.44 DPS
1 Crit = 4.58 DPS
1 Crit = 31.80 AP
1 AP = 0,0349% Crit
Patch 1.9 BIS (R13)
10 AP = 1.44 DPS
1 Crit = 4.67 DPS
1 Crit = 32.43 AP
1 AP = 0,0308% Crit
Patch 1.12 BIS (T3 + R12 Gloves)
10 AP = 1.37 DPS
1 Crit = 4.8 DPS
1 Crit = 35,03 AP
1 AP = 0,0285% Crit
I've used the hunter simulator spreadsheet linked in the "Links & Downloads" section to get these results, using the exact same method as Surelynotdhorn did
_________ BIS GEAR & ENCHANTS _________
This BIS list is based on Crestfall's item progression which isn't completely like retail vanilla, so because of that I've included some items to the earlier patches (Almost only pre 1.5) that other private servers tend to release before their original release date because most likely it'll be the same for Crestfall (Not 100% confirmed yet, I will update whenever I know more).
These are the items which has been included for patches prior to their original release (The patches in parentheses are their original release date):
Blackstone Ring (Patch 1.2)
Carapace Spine Crossbow (Patch 1.4)
Peacemaker (Patch 1.4)
Brutality Blade (Patch 1.4)
Quick Strike Ring (Patch 1.4)
Core Hound Tooth (Patch 1.4)
Biznicks 247x128 Accurascope (Patch 1.4)
Rune of the Guard Captain (Patch 1.5)
Devilsaur Eye (Patch 1.7)
Epic PvP gear will not be considered because it's extremely time consuming to get and not everyone have the time needed to be able to grind it however the post-rework PvP set is BIS until Naxxramas. Link to the pre-rework PvP set Link to the post-rework PvP set
2.1 - Horde BIS List - Current Patch Link to Horde BIS list spreadsheet (Patch 1.1 - 1.12)
2.2 - Alliance BIS List - Current Patch Link to Alliance BIS list spreadsheet (Patch 1.1 - 1.12)
_________ CONSUMABLES & BUFFS _________
Let's face it, it's not expensive to raid as a hunter since we have feign death to save our buffs if the raid wipes, so there's no reason to go cheap on consumables.
Here's all the consumables & buffs that are useful to hunters. (Class buffs not included)
3.1 - World Buffs
Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer +10% Spell Crit, +5% Melee/Ranged Crit, +140 AP - 120 min
Songflower Serenade +15 all stats, +5% Spell/Melee/Ranged Crit - 60 min
Resist Fire +83 Fire Resistance - 60 min
Warchief's Blessing +300 HP, +15% Melee Haste, +10 MP5 - 60 min (Horde only)
DM North Buffs (DM Tribute) +15% Max HP, +200 AP (Does not give RAP... cuz vanilla being vanilla), +3% Spell Crit - 120 min (Patch 1.3)
Sayge's Fortunes (Darkmoon Faire) Choose between +10% Damage/+10% Agi, Int, Spirit, Stam or Str/+10% armor/+25 magic resist - 120 min (Patch 1.6)
Spirit of Zandalar +10% Movement Speed, +15% Stats - 120 min (Patch 1.7 - Persists through death up until patch 1.11)
Lordaeron's Blessing +5% Max HP - 30 min (Patch 1.11)
Traces of Silithyst +5% Damage 30 min (Patch 1.12)
3.2 - Damage Increasing Consumables & Buffs
Elixir of the Mongoose +25 Agility, +2% Crit - 60 min (Does not stack with other agility elixirs/scrolls)
Ground Scorpok Assay +25 Agility - 60 min
Grilled Squid +10 Agility - 10 Min
Oil of Immolation Inflicts fire damage to any enemies around the caster every 3 seconds - 15 sec (Scales with spell power up until patch 1.6)
Crystal Charge / Stratholme Holy Water (Undeads only) Inflicts fire/raw damage to enemies that are hit - 3/10 radius Engineers only:
Dense Dynamite / Thorium Grenade / The Big One / Dark Iron Bomb Inflicts fire damage to enemies that are hit - 5/3/10/5 radius, 0/3/5/4 stun duration
Goblin Sapper Charge Explodes when triggered dealing Fire damage to all enemies nearby and damage to you as well - 10 radius
3.3 - Damage Increasing Pet Consumables & Buffs
Juju Might +40 AP - 10 min (Does not give RAP... cuz vanilla being vanilla)
Juju Power +30 Strength - 30 min
Juju Flurry +3% Attack Speed on friendly target - 20 sec (Puts Rapid Fire on a 30 sec CD if used on yourself)
Scroll of Agility IV +17 Agility - 30 min
3.4 - Sustainability Consumables & Buffs
Demonic Rune / Dark Rune Restores 900 to 1501 mana at the cost of 600 to 1001 life - (Does not share CD with potions)
Whipper Root Tuber Restores 700 to 901 health - (Does not share CD with potions)
Night Dragon's Breath Restores 394 to 457 mana and 394 to 457 health - (Does not share CD with potions)
Major Mana Potion Restores 1350 to 2251 mana - (Does not share CD with runes/felwood consumables)
Major Healing Potion Restores 1050 to 1751 health - (Does not share CD with runes/felwood consumables)
Major Rejuvenation Potion Restores 1440 to 1761 mana and health - (Patch 1.4, Does not share CD with runes/felwood consumables)
Mageblood Potion +12 mp5 - 60 min
Nightfin Soup +10 mp5 - 10 min
Crystal Force +30 Spirit - 30 min
Lesser Mana Oil +5 mp5 - 30 min
Brilliant Mana Oil +12 mp5, +25 Healing Power - 30 min (Patch 1.7)
Spirit of Zanza +50 Stamina, +50 Spirit - 120 min (Patch 1.7, you can only have the effect of one Zanza potion at a time)
Flask of the Titans +1200 Max HP - 120 min (Does not stack with other flasks, persists through death)
Flask of Distilled Wisdom +2000 Max Mana - 120 min (Does not stack with other flasks, persists through death)
Rumsey Rum Black Label +15 Stamina - 15 min
Elixir of Fortitude +120 Max HP - 60 min
Heavy Runecloth Bandage Heals 2000 damage over 8 sec
3.5 - Situational Consumables & Buffs
Limited Invulnerability Potion Makes you immune to physical attacks - 6 sec
Restorative Potion Removes 1 magic, curse, poison or disease effect on you every 5 sec - 30 sec
Free Action Potion Makes you immune to Stun and Movement Impairing effects - 30 sec (Does not remove effects already on the imbiber)
Living Action Potion Makes you immune to Stun and Movement Impairing effects - 5 sec (Does remove effects already on the imbiber)
Elixir of Poison Resistance / Powerful Anti-Venom Cures level 60 poisons
Juju Chill +15 Frost Resistance - 10 min
Juju Ember +15 Fire Resistance - 10 min
Swiftness of Zanza +20% Movement Speed - 120 min (Patch 1.7, you can only have the effect of one Zanza potion at a time, does not stack with Aspect of the Cheetah)
Swiftness Potion +50% Movement Speed - 15 sec (Does not stack with Aspect of the Cheetah)
Greater Arcane Protection Potion Absorbs 1950 to 3251 arcane damage - 60 min
Greater Fire Protection Potion Absorbs 1950 to 3251 fire damage - 60 min
Greater Frost Protection Potion Absorbs 1950 to 3251 frost damage - 60 min
Greater Nature Protection Potion Absorbs 1950 to 3251 nature damage - 60 min
Greater Shadow Protection Potion Absorbs 1950 to 3251 shadow damage - 60 min
_________ RACES & RACIAL ABILITIES _________
This section will be covering all relevant information about the races that can be played as a Hunter.
4.1 - Racial Stats
4.2 - Racial Abilities Dwarf:
Stoneform: While active, grants immunity to Bleed, Poison, and Disease effects. In addition, Armor increased by 10%. Lasts 8 sec. 3 min cooldown.
Gun Specialization: Guns skill increased by 5.
Frost Resistance: Frost Resistance increased by 10.
Find Treasure: Allows the dwarf to sense nearby treasure, making it appear on the minimap.
Night Elf:
Shadowmeld: Activate to slip into the shadows, reducing the chance for enemies to detect your presence. Lasts until cancelled or upon moving.
Night Elf Rogues and Druids with Shadowmeld are more difficult to detect while stealthed or prowling.
Quickness: Dodge chance increased by 1%.
Wisp Spirit: Transform into a wisp upon death, increasing speed by 50%.
Nature Resistance: Nature Resistance increased by 10.
Orc:
Blood Fury: Increases base melee attack power by 25% for 15 sec and reduces healing effects on you by 50% for 25 sec. 2 min cooldown.
Hardiness: Chance to resist Stun effects increased by an additional 25%.
Command: Damage done by Hunter and Warlock pets increased by 5%.
Axe Specialization: Skill with Axes and Two-Handed Axes increased by 5.
Tauren:
War Stomp: Stuns up to 5 enemies within 8 yds for 2 sec. 2 min cooldown.
Endurance: Total Health increased by 5%.
Cultivation: Herbalism skill increased by 15.
Nature Resistance: Nature Resistance increased by 10.
Troll:
Berserking: Increases your casting and attack speed by 10% to 25% (30% after patch 1.9). At full health the speed increase is 10% with a greater effect up to 25% if you are badly hurt when you activate Berserking. Lasts 10 sec. 3 min cooldown.
Regeneration: Health regeneration rate increased by 10%. 10% of total Health regeneration may continue during combat.
Beast Slaying: Damage dealt versus Beasts increased by 5%.
Throwing/Bow Specialization: Skill with Throwing/Bow Weapons increased by 5 (This will make you hit capped at 6 hit instead of 9 if you got a bow equipped)
4.3 - Race Of Choice Horde PvE race ranking:
Troll - Berserking is a great DPS increase especially when synergized with activate trinkets and other CD's, Bow Specialization makes hit capped with 6 hit instead of 9. Regeneration and Beast Slaying are also decent racial abilities however they will be little of a use once you hit level 60. Trolls has the most base agility on the Horde faction.
Orc - Command is a small DPS increase. Occasionally Hardiness will have it's use in PvE as well. Orcs has the second most base agility on the Horde faction.
Tauren - There's no racial abilities that will benefit you in PvE when playing a tauren other than Endurance. Taurens has the lowest base agility on the Horde faction.
Horde PvP race ranking:
Orc - Hardiness this talent alone makes orcs the best PvP race for Horde. Command is a small DPS increase. Orcs has the second most base agility on the Horde faction.
Troll & Tauren - These races are tied because nor trolls or taurens have any significant racial abilities for PvP however trolls favors the offensive playstyle more because of the better DPS racial abilities and taurens favors the more "all around" playstyle since they have more health and a 2 sec stun with 0.5 sec cast time. Trolls has the most base agility on the Horde faction. Taurens has the lowest base agility on the Horde faction.
Alliance PvE race ranking:
Night Elf - There isn't really any of the racial abilities that night elves has which will benefit you in PvE, the only reason why night elves are better in PvE is because night elves has the most base agility on the Alliance faction.
Dwarf - There isn't really any of the racial abilities that dwarfs has which will benefit you in PvE. Gun Specialization isn't good because even when considering it then there won't be any gun that can become best in slot, Stoneform isn't good either because there's barely any boss mechanics where it's useful. Dwarfs has the lowest base agility on the Alliance faction.
Alliance PvP race ranking:
Dwarf - Stoneform is extremely good in PvP since it can be used to get rid of Blind, Crippling Poison, Viper Sting etc. as well as make you more tankier vs physical damage. Dwarfs has the lowest base agility on the Alliance faction.
Night Elf - Shadowmeld is a really nice racial ability for when you're defending bases in BG's so you're able to secure the opener on a enemy player that gets in range of you etc. it has a lot of other great uses and it's a lot of fun to figure out ways to utilize this ability. Night elves has the most base agility on the Alliance faction.
_________ TALENT BUILDS _________
5.1 - Recommended Talent Builds PvE:
1. http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#cZViohthtIbbV0h
Use this spec if you're at 8 hit or below. You can swap talent points from Surefooted to Improved Aspect of the Hawk if you're only missing 1-2% hit.
2. http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#ce0M0xxZViohtht
Use this spec if you're at 9 hit or above
PvP:
For PvP it's a bit of a personal preference, however these are the ones I can recommend
1. http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#cZgVohthtcbimoh
2. http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#cZtVohtZcbiik0ux
I highly recommend moving the points from Improved Wing Clip into Entrapment if you're going to play premade BG's as it will benefit you a lot more.
Leveling:
For leveling it's bit of a personal preference, however this is the spec I can recommend http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#ca0GztxRttVohx
I didn't put points into Spirit Bond because this talent will give the hunter threat every time it heals so if your pet miss pulls a mob then the Hunter will get aggro whenever the talent heals.
5.2 - Experimental Talent Builds PvE 00/21/30 vs 20/31/00 when above 500 agility: On paper the 20/31/00 spec seems to be doing a lot better however in reality there will be some fights where you won't be able to utilize your pets' DPS properly as well as other situational stuff in which case the 00/21/30 spec could potentially be better even when considering the DPS Trueshot Aura provides for your group when using the 20/31/00 spec. I'm gonna have to test this once I get the gear requirements on Crestfall to be able to confirm anything.
Keep in mind that mentioning results from other servers will not prove anything since talent and ability formulas etc could've been completely different on the other server.
_________ PETS & PET ABILITIES _________
6.1 - Pet Of Choice Short answer: Lupos for PvE, Broken Tooth for PvP.
PVE:
Lupos is the best PvE pet because it does Shadow Damage instead of Physical Damage, thus ignoring armor and will benefit from +Shadow Damage debuffs such as Curse of Shadows, Improved Shadow Bolt and Shadow Weaving.
After patch 1.9 you should instead be using Deathmaw if you want a wolf or Broken Tooth if you want a cat because Lupos will no longer be doing Shadow Damage after that patch.
Something you often will hear people say about Lupos is that "it will lower your raids DPS because it consumes Warlock's Improved Shadow Bolt debuffs" however that is completely nonsense even if Lupos truly should be consuming ISB (I haven't seen a single proof of Lupos consuming ISB in retail vanilla so please share if you have proof) due to various reasons:
"Threat cap"
Warlocks are able to do insane amounts of DPS however with insane amounts of DPS comes insane amounts of threat.
This is something that Warlocks have no way of dealing with, instead they're forced into stop DPS'ing so that the tanks can build a bigger threat lead. Hunters do not have this issue because we're not able to do anywhere near as much DPS/threat as a Warlock and because we can Feign Death every 30 seconds to wipe our threat. Even if Warlocks didn't utilize ISB at all they would still have threat issues if they go all in on DPS. So if they were to utilize ISB it would only make them "threat capped" faster, thus sharing ISB with Hunters will be far more effective for the raid.
Not to mention that tanks occasionally will die/fail on boss mechanics or other situational events which will tighten the Warlocks threat cap even further.
So in reality Warlocks wont be getting any additional DPS from ISB unless they're fighting a boss where they can't get aggro (Ragnaros, Ebonroc and Flamegore etc). This might only be legit for Horde Warlocks due to them not being able to benefit from Blessing of Salvation like Alliance Warlocks can. This is also the sole reason as to why Alliance Warlocks are doing so much more DPS on legacy-logs.com and realmplayers.com.
Debuff overlapping
If Hunters aren't using Lupos then Warlocks and Shadow Priest's Mind Blast will be the only classes who are able to utilize ISB, thus being much more likely to overlap ISB stacks and make them go to waste.
ISB isn't the only debuff which Lupos can utilize
There's 3 debuffs that Lupos can utilize; Improved Shadow Bolt, Curse of Shadow and Shadow Weaving so by using Lupos it will make all of these debuffs more effective. If Lupos is being fully buffed and it's target has all of these debuffs then it is able to do 180-200 DPS on it's own which is absolutely insane.
PVP:
Broken Tooth is the best PvP pet, and potentially the best PvE pet after patch 1.9.
The reason why Broken Tooth is the best PvP pet is because it's the only cat that is able to do 1 attack per sec, which is the fastest you can get.
The fast attack speed is very useful in PvP as it makes it nearly impossible for casters to get a spell off because of the cast time push back from Broken Tooth's melee attacks.
There's only 2 other pets in the game which has similar attack speed and that is the ZG bat's, however since they're bats they cannot learn Prowl and Claw which both are great abilities in PvP and bats also does 4% less damage from auto attacks.
When Lupos no longer does Shadow Damage (post patch 1.9), then Broken Tooth can potentially be the superior pet to use in PvE depending on how good you are at pet micro managing.
Broken Tooth (Cats) do not have Furious Howl like Wolfs do which means you can no longer benefit from having your pet by your side just to buff you with Furious Howl, so you'll need to be great at micro managing your pet and make sure it doesn't die as well as not fuck up your own rotation.
If you're not capable of that, then Broken Tooth will not be a DPS boost.
Leveling:
Use any cat for leveling, it doesn't matter which one because they're all be normalized, i.e. all pets of the same pet family does similar DPS regardless of attack speed (unless they're buffed, which in that case fast attack speed pets does more DPS). Also make sure to tame a new cat every now and then so you can get new pet ability ranks.
Use the hunter pet beastiary linked in the "Informative Hunter Links" section to figure out which pets you should tame to get new pet ability ranks.
6.2 - Pet Abilities PVE:
1. Teach your pet max rank Bite and Claw/Furious Howl.
2. Teach your pet max rank Great Stamina.
3. Teach your pet rank 3 resistance. Choose the resistance that would benefit you for the content you're currently raiding.
4. Teach your pet rank 1 Dash (You do not need higher rank for raiding)
5. If done correctly you should now have 5 points left, use them on any rank 1 resistance you want or whatever else you can spend it on.
PVP:
1. Teach your pet max rank Bite, Claw and Prowl.
2. Teach your pet rank 9 Great Stamina.
3. Teach your pet rank 3 Frost Resistance.
4. Teach your pet rank 3 Dash.
5. Teach your pet rank 1 Nature Resist.
Leveling:
Assuming you're using a Cat for leveling which I highly recommend, then this is the priority of which you should be teaching your pet it's abilities.
1. Growl
2. Dash (Only need rank 1)
3. Claw
4. Bite
5. Greater Stamina/Natural Armor
_________ ROTATIONS & COOLDOWNS _________
7.1 - Simplified Rotation Auto-shot->Aimed Shot->Auto-shot->Multi-Shot->Auto-shot->Repeat
See the pattern? Always use Aimed Shot immediately after you've fired an Auto-shot, weave Multi-Shot in between Auto-shots.
7.2 - Explanation Of The Hunter Rotations There's 2 rotations that you should know of. These are known as the "Clipped" and the "Full" rotation.
Every rotation cycle consists roughly of:
1 Aimed Shot
1 Multi-Shot
x Auto Shot
With most weapons, you'll find that Aimed Shot finishes cooldown and Auto Shot fired ~1 sec ago. This makes you choose between: A. (Clipped) Use Aimed Shot right when its cooldown is finished. B. (Full) Delay Aimed Shot until after your next Auto Shot.
A. (Clipped) makes you lose an Auto Shot, but your cycle time is shorter than in B. B. (Full) adds an Auto Shot, but extends your cycle time.
This is important because the cooldown of Aimed Shot is 6 seconds, casting time is 3 seconds. During casting, Auto Shot cools down.
This means that basically every weapon will get a free Auto Shot after Aimed Shot.
The free Auto Shot comes after a delay of about 0.5 seconds after Aimed Shot is fired, regardless of weapon speed.
During the casting of Aimed Shot, no Auto Shots can be fired.
This list will tell you what rotation you should use for all end game weapons, the list is also sorted from best to worst: http://imgur.com/I1Mk8Xw
You can read a far more in depth explanation of clipped vs full rotation here and here
7.3 - "Cycles Are Impossible To Use" They're not. Performing them perfectly is practically impossible, and it's harder with some weapons. However, getting as close as possible will be the most damaging thing you can do.
Thus, the calculations shows the weapon with highest damage potential, and also how to deal the most damage with it.
It's up to you to maximize the potential. Practice, focus, and knowing the rhythm of your weapon helps a lot; you're always able to improve.
Additionally, a timer for your Auto Shots will help you a lot. Personally, I use YAHT.
Clipped cycles are the easiest to use, since you can basically spam Aimed Shot and Multi-Shot, and the cooldowns will take care of the rest.
Remember that latency might affect this a bit, making Aimed Shot ready just before Auto Shot fires (making you do a sub-optimal cycle). Spamming is rarely a good idea; paying attention is.
7.4 - Lag And Human Reaction Invalidate Cycle Calculations Often you'll hear people claiming cycles are useless because of reasons like lag, human reaction, etc.
These settings vary from person to person; hunter A might have perfect conditions, performing at almost 100% of what he's capable of, while hunter B might be experiencing lag, talking on the phone and feeding his parrot - of course he'll perform worse. However, comparing the different weapons, using optimal conditions for everything is the fairest comparison.
Although this has no influence on a weapon's damage potential, if you know you suffer from lag or slow reaction times, take it into consideration when looking at what I write.
7.5 - Aimed Shot Will Be Catching Up To Your Multi-Shot Eventually your Aimed Shot will catch up to your Multi-Shot due to Aimed Shot having "9 sec CD" (6 CD + ~3 sec cast time) and Multi-Shot having a 10 sec CD.
When this happens then using Aimed Shot first will yield the most DPS, unless:
A. You're able to consistently cleave on targets with Multi-Shot.
B. The targets you could've been cleaving on by casting Multi-Shot first would be dead by the time Multi-Shot is ready if you casted Aimed Shot first.
7.6 - Cooldown Management Trinkets:
You should activate your swap trinket just as you start DPSing the boss and when the trinket effect wears off then you swap to your static trinket immediately.
Rapid Fire/Berserking:
Usually you want to use Rapid Fire/Berserking together with your trinket on your opener unless you need to save your cooldowns for a specific boss mechanic.
However using Rapid Fire/Berserking early has the added benefit of you being able to use them multiple times during an encounter depending on the fight duration.
Do not save Rapid Fire/Berserking for Aspect of the Hawk procs since there's literally no reason in doing so when there's only a 5% proc chance.
If you're lucky to get a hawk proc while all your other cooldowns are active then make sure you watch your threat so you don't over aggro.
_________ ADDONS _________
YAHT - Yet Another Hunter Timer This addon gives you an auto shot timer which is crucial if you want to maximize your DPS. It also comes with a Tranquilizing Shot announcer which can be toggle on and off. Highlights:
1. Aimed Shot & Multishot castbars for oCB, eCastingBar and default castbar that recognize all effects that modify castspeed
2. Tranquilizing Shot announcer
3. Highly customizable looks
Visual: The white bar is the "cooldown" time of your auto shot
The red bar is the draw time of your auto shot
Configuration: /yaht
Download Link: https://github.com/Aviana/YaHT
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TrinketMenu (Fixed Version) This addon lets you queue trinkets to auto swap for whenever you get out of combat (Feign Death) and is a must have addon if you want to maximize your DPS.
How to use TrinketMenu:
Have an activate trinket equipped at the start of an encounter, use it on your opener and then queue a static trinket by hovering TrinketMenu and choose a static trinket - after the activate trinket's buff expires you feign death and the addon will auto equip the static trinket that you selected.
Visual:
Configuration: /trinketmenu options
Download Link: https://github.com/satan666/TrinketMenu-Fix
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SHunterTimers This addon makes it easier for you to track your trinket duration, debuff durations, procs, personal CC duration and boss frenzy timer it also makes your cast bar track aimed shot. Every feature can be enabled/disabled through the in game settings.
Visual:
Configuration: /sht menu
Download Link: http://addons.us.to/addon/shuntertimers
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ClassicSnowFall This addon accelerates key bindings so that they are activated by key press rather than key release. This allows you to activate your abilities faster than you could otherwise.
there's no visual or in game configurations options for this addon.
Download Link: http://www.classicwow.com/forum/topic/13899-introducing-classic-snowfall/
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Modified Power Auras This addon is the vanilla version of "WeakAuras" which makes it possible to track every aura/ability/trinket in the game.
Examples of what to track:
Aspect of the Hawk procs
Rapid Fire duration
Trinket(s) duration
Important boss debuffs such as Baron Geddon's Living Bomb, Vaelastrasz's Burning Adrenaline.
Visual:
Configuration: /mpowa
Download Link: https://github.com/Geigerkind/ModifiedPowerAuras
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SimpleFeignHealth This addon makes it possible for you to see your health while you're in feign death.
Configuration: /sfh
Download Link: http://addons.us.to/addon/simplefeignhealth
_________ MACROS _________
Auto Shot This macro makes it so your auto shot no longer can be accidentally toggled off.
it WILL NOT WORK properly if this line doesn't correspond with your Auto Shot hotkey: IsAutoRepeatAction(3)
If your Auto Shot ability is placed on hotkey 3, that means it should be (3) in the macro.
To figure out what hotkey your Auto Shot is on, refer to this image http://i.imgur.com/VGArn.jpg and change it accordingly within the macro.
/run if not IsAutoRepeatAction(3) then CastSpellByName("Auto Shot") end
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Scatter Shot This macro will prevent your pet from breaking Scatter Shot CC.
If you use the Scatter Shot macro on target A and your pet is attacking target B, your pet will continue to attack target B.
If you use the Scatter Shot macro on target A and your pet is attacking target A, your pet will go passive so it doesn't break Scatter Shot CC.
/script if UnitExists("pettarget") and UnitIsUnit("target", "pettarget") then PetPassiveMode(); else end
/cast Scatter Shot
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Frost, Immolation and Explosive Trap This macro will prevent you from using feign death if you're already out of combat but if you're in combat it will feign death first and then trap if pressed twice.
Simply change the first line of the macro to whatever trap you want it for.
/cast Immolation Trap
/script if UnitAffectingCombat("player") then CastSpellByName("Feign Death") end
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Freezing Trap This macro will prevent you from using feign death if you're already out of combat but if you're in combat it will feign death first and then trap if pressed twice.
In addition to the other trap macro, this one will put your pet on passive to prevent breaking CC.
/cast Freezing Trap
/script if UnitAffectingCombat("player") then CastSpellByName("Feign Death") end
/script PetPassiveMode()
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Revive/Mend Pet This macro will use Revive Pet if your pet is dead and Mend Pet if your pet is alive.
/script if not UnitExists(“pet”) then CastSpellByName(“Revive Pet”); else if UnitIsDead(“pet”) then CastSpellByName(“Revive Pet”);else CastSpellByName(“Mend Pet”);end;end
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Call/Dismiss Pet This macro will use Call Pet if your pet is missing and Dismiss Pet if your pet is already called.
/script if PetCanBeAbandoned() then CastSpellByName(“Dismiss Pet”) else CastSpellByName(“Call Pet”);end
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Melee Attacks This is just a basic macro to lump all of your offensive melee skills onto one bind.
/cast Raptor Strike
/cast Counterattack
/cast Mongoose Bite
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Wing Clip This is a fall-through macro for Wing Clip. If you happen to be super low on mana for some reason and can't use maximum rank Wing Clip, a lower rank will be used instead. Counterattack is a priority over all ranks of Wing Clip.
/run if 1==0 then CastSpellByName("Wing Clip");end
/cast Counterattack(Rank 1)
/cast Wing Clip
/cast Wing Clip(Rank 2)
/cast Wing Clip(Rank 1)
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Hunter Tracking This macro will use Track Beasts if you hold down CTRL and press the hotkey you bound it to, Track Humanoids if you hold down SHIFT + press hotkey and Track Hidden if no modifiers are held down when pressing the hotkey.
These are the only important tracking abilities that you should have bound, the rest you can leave in your spell book. Track Beasts is useful to track down Druid flag carriers in BGs, Track Humanoids to track down players, and Track Hidden to increase your stealth detection.
/script c=CastSpellByName if IsControlKeyDown() then c("Track Beasts"); else if IsShiftKeyDown() then c("Track Humanoids"); else c("Track Hidden");end;end
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Nefarian Hunter Class Call First of all, this macro will require you to have 2 ranged weapons, 1 equipped and 1 in bag slot 1.
All this macro does is to equip the ranged weapon which is in bag slot 1, this will be useful versus Nefarian because of the hunter class call mechanic that will break our current equipped weapon, however we have no way of knowing if its gonna be our class call or others.
So switching to a secondary ranged weapon before the class call timer hits will put us out of risk for our main weapon to break, meanwhile were still able to DPS.
/script SpellStopCasting()
/run local p,s="player",18 if GetInventoryItemLink(p,s)then PickupContainerItem(0,1)EquipCursorItem(s)end
------
One button Viper/Scorpid Sting This macro will use Viper Sting if the target is a mana class, if its not then it'll use Scorpid Sting instead.
/script if UnitPowerType(“target”)==0 then CastSpellByName(“Viper Sting”) else CastSpellByName(“Scorpid Sting”); end
_________ LINKS & DOWNLOADS _________
Horde BIS List Spreadsheet Patch 1.1 - 1.12 [LINK]
Alliance BIS List Spreadsheet Patch 1.1 - 1.12 [LINK]
Hunter Damage Cycles Breakdown 1.0 [LINK]
Hunter Damage Cycles Breakdown 2.0 [LINK]
TKA Something - A Hunter Site From Retail Vanilla [LINK]
Consumables List [LINK]
Hunter Pet Beastiary [LINK]
Hunter Simulator [DOWNLOAD] You can upload the simulator to google sheets if you don't have excel

Greets.
Maybe not quite the right topic to suit the realm discussion forum but I hate blank canvasses so there you go.
So it strikes me that there will be a lot of visitors to this forum that actually have never played WoW (hard to believe, I know) or have never experienced the dubious 'pleasures' of Vanilla. I also feel that it's likely that employees, representatives and camp followers of retail may turn up from time to time to keep an eye on things and consider a C&D order against, what the hell, KUL TIRAS. So I don't have any right to represent the players, the GM's, the administrators or the developers being just a simple player, and a poor one at that (but so good at irony), so I will speak for myself as to why I want to play vanilla wow, and why I want to play on this server with this engine.
More learned, eloquent, experienced and passionate individuals can post hereafter, should they wish to do so. I plead a cathartic need to express myself.
1. I'm old. Well, 51 isn't THAT old but it probably puts me in the wrong 5% chronologically. More particularly, it puts me at an age where my formative years in gaming predates MMO's and most computer games. I mean, when I was a teenager, Space Invaders was the most awesome electronic experience you could have - although I preferred pinball to be honest. So when I was experiencing gaming, it was through RPG's like Basic D&D, Runequest, Traveller et al. Most of my peers who also play WoW would spend years in RPG campaigns as a cooperative measure of gaming experience that gave us all a lot of interpersonal skills as an unseen bonus, friendships for life, as well as a grounded love of fantasy and SF. A progression to computer games as an alternative to RPG's was a no-brainer, but all of them were First Person and so never replicated the cooperative and social aspects of RPG's
2. I love WoW. Luckily for me, I never had to go through early MMO's like Ultima, Age of Camelot and Everquest - which I'm sure were fine, but not a patch on WoW. No, I went straight to university when a bunch of us decided we would pick one MMO and just get a taster for what this new fangled computer game was like. It was a lot different then. First of all, none of us knew what the fuck we were doing. Most of us were Night Elves and half of us were Druids. We all thought Darkshore was a normal quest area. We didn't have Interfaces or add-ons. We were awful in instances and generally avoided them. PvP was scary, if we got into a fight with Horde we panicked and spammed Levitate or some other useful spell. We were, sorry some of us were, just terrible players. But. We. Had. Fun. There is a quest in Teldrassil called 'Relics of Wakening'. It is an awful quest in a cave system with rapidly spawning mobs, hard to locate NPC's and nearly everyone in the area is drawing adds or just getting in the way. I completed it the first time because some Romanian 17th level warrior insisted on making us a group (I didn't know how) and killing every mob as an escort until I was finished. His English was slightly better then my Romanian but we got through it. I had never, and have since never, experienced the love, comradeship, friendship and downright humanity in a gaming interface as I discovered through WoW. And all of this was on underpowered computers and crappy internet connections.
3. The WoW expansions. Burning Crusade is the single greatest gaming expansion of all time. It is the Godfather II of gaming sequels to the Godfather. It was the perfect example of what made WoW, WoW, and the biggest feather in the cap of Blizzard that they will ever have (sorry Hearthstone, Overwatch). Burning Crusade represents my apogee in WoW. A Drenai Shaman, a farmer, a fisherman, Karazhan, guilds, camaraderie, interfaces, PuG's, Flying Mounts, Daily quests (eventually) and even PvP. The single most enjoyable online gaming experience I have ever had. It's not that the game was necessarily easier (I always leveled to 60 first as Hellfire was such a chore), but at least you only had to get 10 more levels (or 70 as a new race) and the increase in professions was relatively easy. But it was just the same, but only better.
4. The decline and fall of the Blizzard Empire. It didn't happen overnight. WotLK had its faults (like DK's) but it was a natural progression. Cataclysm on the other hand was wisely named and I didn't even bother with Mists or WoD. The game was not the same. Funny thing was, we tried other MMO's but none of them lasted and we all got tired of them pretty quickly. Most of us had work commitments, or family and social commitments, or plain just grew up. And yet....and yet....there was always a fire burning for the good old times. Now we knew the past was never going to be the same, for many reasons. We were eventually, better players. Our grasp of economics was sound. We knew how to multitask and maximise efforts and minimise the workload. But secretly we all wanted to go back to those halcyon days where men were real men and Taurens were real cows. Often I would go on Blizzard forums and read the posts from other, similar players, who wanted to experience vanilla and early expansions. Always there would be a response from a blue saying basically it wasn't physically possible, it would cost too much, you wouldn't like it, YOU THINK YOU DO BUT YOU DON'T. There would be a plethora of younger players trying to encapsulate why anyone would want to wait until L40 to get a mount. Or have 40 man raids. Or what world PvP might be like. Under the Blizzard hegemony they would never know.
5. Dad, have you ever heard of Nostalrius? It's a private vanilla WoW server and I'm just dinged L12. Well no I hadn't. I had never even thought of looking for private servers. I didn't even know what Reddit was. But there I was, after a very short download in Tedrassil hearing that wonderful music again. It nearly brought a tear to my eye. No seriously, I was chopping onions there, very sensitive so I am. Then it was easy, got a good friend over and then ensnared enough RL mates to do instances. Downloaded Mumble and the boys were back in town. But not as we know, for long. So when the C&D shut down Nost it really pissed me off. OI moved on to other private servers but none of them worked for me, bad latency, PvP only, tiny populations. Always, I joined when the servers were mature, never got the chance to start from scratch.
6. And then came Crestfall. So this was it. This was the one I could get involved with from the start. This was a version of Vanilla where it was going to go out all present and correct. No stone would be left unturned. You can tell. The whole forum breathes professionalism. These are my kind of people. This is my home. Either this works out and I stay here as long as it exists or it doesn't and I will never play WoW again.
I want to play vanilla WoW because it is a completely better and different version of the game to current retail.
I want to play vanilla WoW because I have paid my dues to Blizzard in purchasing expansions and monthly subscriptions. I don't owe you anything anymore, you have no say over me.
I will never play on official Blizzard legacy or vanilla servers because a) they don't understand and will never get it right and b) they'll never do it anyway. YOU THINK YOU DO BUT YOU DON'T
I want to play on Crestfall because I trust these guys and I know they get it.
So those of you antipathetic to Vanilla, or Private Servers, or looking for their pound of corporate flesh, I have no argument with you. Your opinion is as worthy as mine. But I challenge you to express yourselves as forthrightly and passionately as we do.
For those of you who never experienced WoW, or vanilla, come join us and see what all the passion is about. And if you are failing Relics of Awakening, PM me in game, and I'll take you though it and return the favour I still owe.

_________ World Buffs _________
In this guide I will be covering what all world buffs do and how to get them. If you feel the need to chime in and cover some ground, of which I'm sure that I've missed, feel free to do so! I’m open minded for all questions and suggestions regarding the guide and I will gladly hear them out. You can contact me on Crestfall's discord channel or on Crestfall's forum via PM's or by commenting on this thread. What Are "World Buffs" And Why Gather Them? World buffs are very powerful buffs which you can gather in several zones of Azeroth. You do not need these buffs to be able to beat any of the content in vanilla by any means but it will strengthen your raid immensely.
In vanilla WoW, class mechanics aren't that hard to master, instead gear optimization and world buffs are what will make you stand out from the rest. So it'll definitely be ideal to gather all of these world buffs if you're stuck on a boss fight or if you want to compete on the TPS/DPS/HPS meters.
One last thing. If you're a main tank then I cannot recommend you enough to gather these world buffs for every single raid as it will strengthen your entire raid ridiculously much, far far more than if anyone else would be gathering them.
World Buffs Quick List
Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer +10% Spell Crit, +5% Melee/Ranged Crit, +140 AP - 120 min
Songflower Serenade +15 all stats, +5% Spell/Melee/Ranged Crit - 60 min
Resist Fire +83 Fire Resistance - 60 min
Warchief's Blessing +300 HP, +15% Melee Haste, +10 MP5 - 60 min (Horde only)
DM North Buffs (DM Tribute) +15% Max HP, +200 AP, +3% Spell Crit - 120 min (Patch 1.3)
Sayge's Fortunes (Darkmoon Faire) Choose between +10% Damage/+10% Agi, Int, Spirit, Stam or Str/+10% armor/+25 magic resist - 120 min (Patch 1.6)
Spirit of Zandalar +10% Movement Speed, +15% Stats - 120 min (Patch 1.7 - Persists through death up until patch 1.11)
Lordaeron's Blessing +5% Max HP - 30 min (Patch 1.11)
Traces of Silithyst +5% Damage 30 min (Patch 1.12)
Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer Stats and duration:
+10% Spell Crit, +5% Melee/Ranged Crit, +140 AP - 120 min How to get:
When Head of Onyxia or Head of Nefarian is turned in, the players located in (or nearby) Orgrimmar or Stormwind are buffed with this buff.
Songflower Serenade Stats and duration: +15 all stats, +5% Spell/Melee/Ranged Crit - 60 min How to get: Cleanse a Corrupted Songflower and then loot a Cleansed Songflower in Felwood to receive the buff
To cleanse a Corrupted Songflower you first have to complete the quest Cleansing Felwood which then unlocks a few new quests. Some of these quests will only be available depending on which profession you have, however there is also a quest for those with no profession (Salve via Hunting, Salve via Mining, Salve via Gathering, Salve via Skinning and Salve via Disenchanting).
Each of the "Salve via X" quests rewards you with Cenarion Plant Salve which is needed to cleanse a Corrupted Songflower (or any of the other corrupted plants in Felwood).
Once a Corrupted Songflower has been cleansed, it will stay cleansed for the next 2 hours however the plant can only be looted once every 25 minutes. Note:
If multiple people loot the plants at more or less the exact time then everyone will be rewarded, thus I highly recommend everyone to install FelwoodGather which is an addon from retail vanilla. One of it's many features is to provide an in game countdown timer so that everyone can get rewarded from the same plant. Corrupted Songflower Locations (Roughly):
Resist Fire Stats and duration:
+83 Fire Resistance - 60 min How to get:
Mind Control a Scarshield Spellbinder (either by the Priest spell or the Engineering device), found in Blackrock Spire and use his abilities to buff you and your raid members. Notes:
Sometimes the tooltip will say differing amounts of Fire Resistance, but the buff always provides 83 resistance. Stacks with Paladin's resistance aura and Shaman's resistance totem.
Warchief's Blessing (Horde Only) Stats and duration:
+300 HP, +15% Melee Haste, +10 MP5 - 60 min (Horde only) How to get:
When the head of Rend Blackhand is returned after a player completes "For the Horde!" (the end of the first part of the Onyxia pre-quest chain), all players located in Orgrimmar and The Crossroads are buffed.
Dire Maul North Buffs (DM Tribute) Stats and duration:
+15% Max HP, +200 AP, +3% Spell Crit - 120 min (Patch 1.3) How to get:
To get these buffs you will have to clear a full DM Tribute run and talk to the remaining bosses.
The DM Tribute run is a way to improve the gear dropped from Dire Maul north as well as getting some powerful world buffs. When King Gordok is killed, the player is declared king and all the remaining bosses give tribute which is often better than the gear they drop when you kill them individually, when you talk to each of the remaining bosses after you've been declared king, they will buff you. The goal is therefore to kill the king without killing any other bosses.
Sayge's Fortunes (Darkmoon Faire) Stats and duration: Choose between +10% damage/+10% any stat/+10% armor/+25 magic resist - 120 min (Patch 1.6) How to get: These buffs will only be available when Darkmoon Faire opens which happens once every month. Darkmoon Faire will rotate between spawning outside either Thunderbluff or Goldshire (Elwynn Forest). You can participate in the Darkmoon Faire regardless of what faction you are and where it spawns. If you go to the fortune-seeking Gnoll, "Sayge", he will tell you your fortune by giving you a strong buff and a small note. You can only receive a new buff after at least two hours and if your buff has run out. You can choose which buff Sayge should buff you with by following this chart:
Spirit of Zandalar Stats and duration: +10% movement speed, +15% all stats - 120 min (Patch 1.7) How to get: When the Heart of Hakkar is turned in to Molthor on Yojamba Isle as part of The Heart of Hakkar quest, all players on the Isle and in Booty Bay will receive the buff. Yojamba Isle Location:
Lordaeron's Blessing Stats and duration: +5% Max HP - 30 min (Patch 1.11) How to get: Take control of the northpass tower in Eastern Plaguelands and click the Lordaeron Shrine which appears outside the door. Notes:
The buff only persists in the plaguelands and instances/raids within the plaguelands (Scholomance and Stratholme and Naxxramas) Lordaeron Shrine Location (Roughly):
Traces of Silithyst Stats and duration: +5% Damage - 30 min (Patch 1.12) How to get: Traces of Silithyst is a buff acquired after turning in Silithyst at the player's respective collection site in Silithus.
To pick up Silithyst, locate a geyser and pick it up. The geyser will despawn, and the player will be carrying the Silithyst. While carrying it, your movement speed is reduced (abilities like "Sprint" will not have any effect) and you will be unable to mount without dropping the Silithyst. The other way of getting Silithyst is locating a player of the opposing faction carrying some. Upon damaging that player, he will drop his/her Silithyst, creating a Silithyst Mound allowing any player to temporarily pick up the Silithyst.
After collecting Silithyst, run to your faction's turn in point (See location below), displayed on the map and get the buff. You will also get 19 Honor Point and 10 reputation with the Cenarion Circle faction as well as 1 progress point for The Silithyst Must Flow world PvP event.

---Triface's Guide to Threat and Tanking in Vanilla---
**Disclaimer: This guide was not written by me. I've only done some formatting. All credit goes to the Reddit user Triface for writing this guide! You can find his original comment here. I'm submitting it to the Crestfall Forums for the sake of posterity.**
Defensive Stance
The stance you are in affects how much threat you deal:
Battle Stance and Berserker Stance both give your threat a x0.8 multiplier, meaning that if you do something that causes 100 raw threat it will only cause 80 threat in these stances.
Defensive Stance on the other hand has a x1.3 multiplier, so that 100 threat is now 130.
While there are some benefits to using the other stances, they are usually specific to only a few situations and to some more advanced techniques which you would mainly need when raiding. In general you want to ignore the other stances as they will only complicate things for little benefit (the main exception to this rule is using Mocking Blow which I will go into a bit more detail about later).
The Pull
As a tank you should always be the one to pull, the reasons for this are twofold:
The mobs attack you first which makes them easy to group together and the damage that they do will be giving you rage right away.
In order to pull aggro from someone you need to cause 10-30% (10% in melee, 30% ranged) more threat than the person at the top of the mob's hate list. If you are the first to pull then you are instantly at the top of the hate list and everyone else needs to do at least 10% more threat than you to gain aggro.
It's always best to pull with your ranged weapon if possible, this way you can always pull to a safe position and minimise the risk of other packs of mobs getting aggroed by accident.
After pulling, the first thing you want to do is to activate Bloodrage - gaining rage causes threat at a rate of 5 threat per 1 rage so you are instantly putting out threat before the mobs have even reached you and you have some rage to start using your skills right away.
Rotations
So you have pulled the pack of mobs and activated Bloodrage. Nine times out of ten the next step is to Shield Block - this means that you will almost certainly block the first hit which will enable you to use your most powerful threat-generating ability: Revenge.
Revenge is both the most efficient threat ability that you have (even including the cost of Shield Block) and the highest threat-generating ability in your arsenal outside of Shield Slam. You should use Revenge on the main target on cooldown, using Shield Block to proc it when necessary.
Next is Sunder Armor: this is your bread and butter threat spam skill. You generally want to put one or two Sunder Armor on the main target after Revenge just to put you ahead of the DPS. Heroic Strike shouldn't be used at all unless you are generating rage faster than you are able to spend it with Sunder Armor, which won't be often in 5-mans.
At this point, you need to start thinking about generating threat on the adds.
Contrary to popular belief, Thunderclap is actually a poor choice for AoE threat in vanilla; Battle Shout is almost always the better option.
In vanilla, Battle Shout does 55 threat per person buffed (so 275 threat in a 5-man party) split between all the mobs which can be compared to the 130 split threat plus the damage caused per mob with Thunderclap. When you add in the multipliers for being in Battle Stance (x0.8 threat) or Defensive Stance (x1.3 threat) that changes to 375 threat total for Battle Shout vs. 104 + (damage x0.8) threat for Thunderclap. Another thing to take into consideration is that Thunderclap costs 20 rage compared to Battle Shout's 10 rage, meaning that you can get two shouts to one clap.
In addition to this, since Battle Shout is a buff it causes no damage so it doesn't break CC and has full threat at any range from the mobs since it is affecting your allies rather than the mobs directly, while Thunderclap's damage can break CC and only causes threat to the mobs hit by the skill.
A Battle Shout or two will build up some initial threat on all mobs, giving you some time to start cycling through the adds; solidifying your threat with Sunder Armor.
Your average rotation will look something like this: Pull ---> Bloodrage ---> Shield Block ---> Revenge main target ---> Sunder Armor main target x1-2 ---> Battle Shout x1-2 ---> Sunder Armor adds one at a time, switching to Revenge main target whenever it's up, with extra Sunder Armor on the main target as needed. There will be deviations depending on the situation of course; for example if you need to gather up caster mobs with Shield Bash, but this is the general order you want to go with.
Managing Your Group
The hardest part of tanking is generally trying to stop your group from doing stupid shit .
From the high damage DPS with no concept of threat management or crowd control mechanics to the healers who think that they need to keep everyone at 100% at all times, no matter how well you play you will lose aggro to these people and it will always be your fault. Always.
Taunt is your go-to skill for these situations: it works by giving you threat equal to the highest person on the monster's hate list (so if you have aggro already it does nothing in that regard) and forces the monster to attack you for a time. During that time you need to build your threat up quickly so that the mob doesn't just switch back after the Taunt ends.
The temptation is to Taunt as soon as you lose aggro but say a DPS gets aggro, takes some hits and you taunt it back, then your healer throws a big heal on the DPS and gains aggro instead; the cooldown on Taunt will seem like an eternity at that point! You should generally save Taunt for when your healer gets aggro since a dead DPS is a slower fight but a dead healer is a wipe.
If you think the healer is safe you can Taunt but sometimes it is better to let a DPS take a couple of hits to help them remember that they need to manage their threat as much as you need to manage yours .
You also have Mocking Blow available in Battle Stance if your Taunt wasn't enough or was resisted. Challenging Shout, the AoE taunt, is another option if things are looking really grim. Binding both of these abilities to a key is very useful and putting Mocking Blow in the same position on your Battle Stance action bar as Taunt is on your Defensive Stance action bar lets muscle memory aid you when switching to Battle Stance.
Using Tarket Markers to mark targets (skull icon etc.) can help greatly in keeping the group on the right target and keeping CC from being broken, so where possible you want to do this or at least try and get the group leader to do it.
Additionally, another great piece of advice is getting a threat meter addon as this can give you pre-warning of losing aggro and makes you aware of those in the group with poor aggro management.
There are a lot of other little points as well but I think this has gotten pretty huge already so I will leave it at that. I hope this helps you!
TL;DR
(Almost) Always be in Defensive Stance.
Always be the one to pull.
Pull from range to a safe spot.
Skill order after pulling is generally Bloodrage ---> Shield Block ---> Revenge main target ---> Sunder Armor main target x1-2 ---> Battle Shout x1-2 ---> cycle through adds using a Sunder Armor on each while using Revenge on main target whenever you can plus the odd Sunder Armor.
Try and save Taunt for pulling aggro from your healer.
Try and manage your group by calling targets.
Get a threat meter addon.

Hey all,
Before starting this topic I'd like to write a short introduction about myself and how I came to make this post. I've been playing WoW since Vanilla until now, and I've been introduced to private servers with Arena Tournament TBC edition somewhere around 10 years ago. Also, probably like many of you, I grew older by the time. I read about Crestfall shortly after Nostalrius' downfall, and since then I have lurked this forum on and off and have been waiting for this project to be released from your perfectionist hands. In the meantime, I had hoped for Nostalrius' revival, and was very excited for their announcements until I saw it would be led mainly by Valkyrie's team (at the time). Still I headed towards Elysium with the rest of people en masse. It would be short to say disappointment quickly happened. Their drama made me leave, so I just kept reading their stuff to see where the sinking ship would go under. To my surprise, it was still holding its gas, thus even improving with time.
Then why I am here?
Because I'm upset about Crestfall's future, and I do have some interrogations. I should add that stirring up drama isn't my purpose (forum isn't very active yet anyway ) and that I am just a classic WoW enthusiast, looking for what's best and available.
So here are some of my thoughts and questions:
1. What is expected population, and more importantly, wanted? I read that Asura will be fine with low pop. Can he say the same about massive increase? What do you think?
2. Spreading out jam too thin over all these extensions could hurt project viability.
Yes, it will depend on the amount of players you get. Also, I'm not sure it is a good thing to not allow toons play all on all extensions whenever they want to. While it serves immersion, I feel like it will diminish gameplay experience, like leaving Vanilla dead for instance. Faster than it normally would. Why waste your strong scripts and data?
3. Why not focus on Vanilla instead? TBC and WotLK "market" share has been pretty much taken already. Players are tired of leveling again and again, switching over servers for years. I don't think I'm alone when I say that I'm looking for my last WoW experiences. We all like this game, but we can't play it forever. You could make the best Vanilla project ever made, and if you care that much about progressing through content, why not just open TBC and WotLK and adjust them to lvl 60 cap? That way you would be different from others. I am not convinced allowing the same characters go through extensions will make enough of a difference for people who can just create them on different servers already (Who cares about achievements anyway? ).
4. What are the Vanilla only boys and girls to expect?
Basically, I for one am interested in Vanilla mainly, and am looking for a home. Nostalrius left me with a craving that I have to end for my WoW "career" to be complete. I don't know how others feel about it. But I don't want to level here, only to find a dead realm after 2 years (TBC launch expected right?). If you really are deep into this PTE idea, then so be it. Looking at how things go, Crestfall won't release until end of year. So I, like some others, have to prepare for what is to come. This could be the best, or another wasted opportunity. Perhaps I'm just alone, I just wanted to share some of my fears and perspectives. Is all.
Thank you anyway if you took the time to read it all, please if you have answers, do it in a constructive manner.
Cya.

So I checked Urban Dictionary and it was only at explanation #9 that we got a basic definition:
There's another alternative here:
So here's the interesting thing. Most of you are fully aware how Vanilla WoW compares to retail in the sense that over an extended period of time, Blizzard have actively reduced the amount of effort required by players to advance in levels, gain reputation and rewards, or get access to game time reducers like mounts. A common mistake is that people have called this 'dumbing down the game'. It is no such thing. As an example, I can offer my experiences in playing the game in Vanilla or TBC where my role as healer involved pretty much standing in one spot and spamming appropriate spells, compared to WotLK, where I had to do complex tasks like moving FFS, or taking part in timed actions that reduced the chances of party wipes. All in all, instance and raid skills were far more complicated = skillful, than what I experienced in Vanilla.
But I digress. We are playing vanilla, and will be for quite some time. So the purpose of this thread is to highlight that critical element to Vanilla WoW that separates it from retail on a permanent basis. This is of course the fact that vanilla is the biggest grindfest (and therefore timesink) in pretty much any playable game (bar Everquest), and if you are going to be moderately successful you are going to need to be pretty good at it. Unlike the second urban definition, grinding in WoW will not make you a better player. Your skill in vanilla is not determined by how much grinding you have done. You will not become a stronger nor better player by outgrinding others. Of course, constant raiding and PvPing will make you a better player from experience, but not necessarily a skillful one.
So let's examine this grinding malarkey and break it down according to criteria:
Level Grinding
The classic chicken and egg question of WoW, is it quicker to level up by grinding on mobs or is it quicker to level up by questing? The answer of course is both. Grinding on appropriate level mobs in my experience is faster than questing. It also the advantage in that the loot gained from your grinding is sellable/tradeable and thus removes the burden of cash-flow problems. Your positive bank balance can then be used to invest in a few blue items every 10 levels to further increase your grind speed ratio. However, the truth of the matter is that grinding alone while faster, is imbalanced and frankly, incredibly mind-numbingly dull. So my actual recommendation is that you should always look for a life-balance of level advancement in questing (chain quests give good rewards + getting your reputation to exalted saves a ton of money on mounts), combined with certain instances (mostly for Boss drops, quest hand-ins and a quick level up for little work - Deadmines being a classic example), and finally selective grinding spots where you can jump 5 or so levels in a short space of time.
To make full use of the level grinding you should tailor it for your own needs. For example, Raven Hill Cemetery/Duskwood is a favourite of mine, it has some of the best quest chains in the game, has some brilliant elites that kick ass if you get on the wrong side of them, and gives a great grinding area for secondary professions like fishing and first aid. Other 'proper' professions like tailoring will concentrate on humanoids for cloth drops, beasts for skinning as a leatherworker (Yetis in Hillsbrad etc) or even just concentrating on grinding mobs where there are excellent resources (Thousand Needles for ores etc).
The key thing here in my opinion is balance and working smart. Grinding mobs for XP is all very well, but if you have a sidebar on leveling professions or sandwiching it between a couple of instances or completing some suitable geographical quests then the grinding seems part of an ongoing sequence. The other element to take into account is that some classes do not grind particularly well in vanilla, like say Paladins and to a lesser extent, warriors. Just as importantly, some mobs are not particularly friendly to grinding if your class has no decent spell interrupt for example. Just remember, that from L58-60 you are going to have to grind mobs the level up anyway...
Oh, and we forgot about bags. There's no point in spending all your time level grinding with repeated trips to the AH, bank or vendor because your pathetic bag space keeps getting full. You can never have enough big bags so get to know a tailor or upgrade as a priority whenever you have the spare funds.
Er, we also forgot about different types of level grinding so for example, single target grinding as outlined above, then AOE grinding using spells which tends to be class/mob specific (this usually requires skills) and then finally Power AOE grinding where you persuade some, preferably higher level player than you, to heal you as you go AOE mad, reducing the fine line between multiple mob deaths or getting killed as you were too greedy/stupid/unskilled.
Finally, I completely forgot about having a relevant add-on like Titan Panel as some of the units available Handy link to add-ons here keep track of XP/per hour, ~time until next level, gold/per hour and lots of relevant stuff as to how good or bad the area/mobs you are grinding on.
Farming is grinding with one less letter
Scarily, the very first definition of farming in Urban Dictionary is not 'working on the land to produce foodstuffs for your fellow human beings' but rather:
In video games, it's when you collect a bunch of a certain item in order to power yourself up.
Orb farming in Devil May Cry 3.
Soul farming in Castlevania: Aria/Dawn of Sorrow.
Seriously, I fear for the human race, but as usual I digress.....
There is a difference between farming and grinding, but it's a very small one. Grinding is a useful definition on what makes Vanilla WoW different from retail WoW, apart of course from the social, community, bonding, getting to know people, cooperative and just plain this is what makes people, people differences of course. Whereas farming tends to focus on one aspect of the game where a repeat action gives a definitive result. This result is usually but not always an improvement to the character performing the farming. Some classic examples of this would be:
Gold farming
There are many, many guides on how to farm gold in Vanilla most of which are trash. If there was an easy way to circumvent the grind that is Vanilla WoW we'd all be doing it. In essence, gold farming is all about finding the area/mobs/instances/raids that are level appropriate for your toon(s) that provide a maximum amount of gold/per hour. As there are many ways to generate gold (cash drops/equipment drops/materials for professions/rare drops) there are a very large number of ways of doing this. Best to break this down into a manageable process is to determine why people need gold in the first place.
For starters, you need gold to level up your toons. Typically this involves three separate areas. The first is to purchase new character skills for your class from the trainer. This starts to get very expensive at around L30 where the amount of cash you make from questing doesn't cover the full costs. People who are power leveling will typically ignore non-essential skills and just purchase the ones that maximise DPS output or damage mitigation. This is why my personal choice is to incorporate level grinding with questing as the extra income provided gives you a better balance.
The second reason is leveling up your professions. As already discussed, questing and level grinding in areas that will also allow access to materials for professions saves time and gold. However, there is a preferred option to this for some people with power leveling. When this server(s) start, the players who advance to L60 first will have an enormous advantage over everyone else. By ignoring the siren call to a balanced approach to leveling they get to 60 and just concentrate on farming the most appropriate cash/vendor junk mobs. This makes them the richest players on Crestfall and allows them the facility to purchase any item on the AH they require. As the AH is comparatively small and most people are leveling up in relation to each other, the items they need to advance there professions are very cheap, and what they really save on is the time they would have 'wasted' on this grind in the first place.
The third reason is acquisition of a mount. For some cheating classes like Warlocks, this is not a problem. For other classes like hunters and druids it's not so critical thanks to their own in-class speed boosts. But for everyone else, access to a mount is the single most important event that reduces the grind in WoW. Clearly, if you are leveling up by questing then a 60% increase in speed means getting from one quest hub to another, handing in quests and all-round general moving about in Vanilla is a massive time-saver. For power-levelers this is not that relevant as they tend to grind on appropriate mobs that are easy to get to, or just not bother going to an inn as rested XP just isn't that relevant.
So as you can see from the above, gold farming as an aid to leveling your toon or professions doesn't really make a lot of sense until you are at a reasonably high level (50+) where the gold you generate allows you to take advantage of a poorly developed AH or purchase that mount. Depending on how you level, you can either take an holistic approach where you level everything in tandem (level/professions/secondary skills/reputation) which will be slow, or just select an item from the menu and stick with that.
So in reality, gold farming only becomes relevant at end levels. Here, the people who power-leveled to 60 at the start need to be in a similar power-leveling guild or they won't have access to the raids and instances they need to give the best cash returns. Similarly, the baby economy in the AH won't be interested in a large amount of the products they can harvest, either because they are not level-appropriate or because they simply can't afford them. So for the first few weeks a small circle of elites will be trading and selling amongst themselves.
However, as the number of players blossom and level-up, the economy gets stronger and the raiding and farming gets more lucrative. At a later stage a glorious tipping point occurs. The raiding guilds give up farming on mobs/instances/items and start farming raids instead. While this is mostly down to acquiring boss drops to better equip their members it's also about generating cash. This cash is used to purchase the unbelievable amount of consumables raiding guilds need. These consumables are usually provided by players like me who level up holistically and rely on these raiding guilds to provide me with an income. This is a virtuous cycle that is finely balanced. The balance can be upset by things such as multiboxing, bad scripting like multiple item nodes, gold farming for cash and numerous other exploits. For this, we as a community need to support the staff of Crestfall to keep these instances down to a minimum.
So to recap on gold farming:
Gold farming involves a grinding routine in an area where the net result is cash
That it's probably not effective to do this as a leveling enhancement unless you want the proceeds to pay for your professions/mount
That those who level to 60 first will farm to retrospectively enhance the areas they neglected to level up on their journey as well as getting raiding materials for consumables
That when these individuals start to raid effectively, the gold farming is usually done by the second the third tiers of players who reach level 60
That the community needs to work with the administrators to make gold farming as equitable as possible.
Grinding for specific stuff
Which is really farming part II. Typically divided into two areas. Grinding on items that you need (typically this is for professions) or grinding for items to sell (AKA gold farming). So no point in adding to what has already been said other than the benefits for farming in level appropriate areas. One of the tricks of the trade is to level up two gathering professions (skinning/mining/herbalism) as this maximises your gold return as you level up to 60. With the (presumably) excess cash generated you can then delete one profession at 60 and take the appropriate partner skill like leatherworking/blacksmithing/engineering/alchemy) and just buy the stuff you need.
But to develop the 'specific stuff' part of this farming module I'll give you a specific example. It's a little known factoid (the original meaning) that I am the world's greatest expert on Tiny Crimson Whelpling. This si because I've farmed them on pretty much every toon I have ever played past L24. Initially, this was as I really like the idea of vanity pets because clearly, I am vain. The problem is that the drop-rate in 1 in 1000. As there are a limited amount of mobs that can drop this item, you are going to be spending a lot of time before you get it, unless you are lucky.
I am happy to announce that the drop-rate on Nostalrius is accurate after it took me 1100 kills for it to drop, this is as a direct contrast to the Hyacinth Macaw which should have an even worse drop-rate but was a dime a dozen on their AH. The key here is parsing this grind/farming in the best context for the player. In farming/grinding this area I went from L22 to L29 as a holy priest paying for all new spells and profession related boosts. It also generated about 26 gold from cash drops and vendoring grey/white items. This doesn't take into account the greens/blues/plans etc that dropped too. Of course, what I should have done was to use a toon that had skinning. Firstly as this would have provided a significant level boost to skinning and secondly, the extra mats would have vastly increased the cash revenue.
The element I'm really getting here is the cash reward on the AH for the pet. On a full grown server these should sell for about 100 gold each. On Nost, they were selling between 20 and 50 gold even though the population was quite high. However, this was on the PvE server which was still in the early days of developing. So the options are to keep the pet and show your vanity, or sell the pet as a huge contribution to your mount costs etc. By combining it with leveling the toon, the professions and the cash reward it all makes sense. The timing of course is critical as to what the value is of the drop.
So when we talk about grinding for specific stuff you can see that the options and reasoning is hugely varied. I am just advocating that the approach and rationale should make sense both to you and the game. At thsi stage I could go on about the disgusting oozeling pet debuff trick, but that's for another day/life.
Raid Grinding
I know nothing about this having never raided apart from going back in BC/WotLK format as a 5-man just to see the old content. What I do know is that it's much harder than any of the raiding I did in TBC, by which I mean Karazhan. I don't think that really counts for much. It's harder than retail WoW for the simple reason that the end content requires something like 50-60 dedicated raiders in your hardcore guild. Retail WoW completely bypasses this, perhaps correctly. But it means that when people make comparisons they completely forget how hard it is to keep 50-60 real people happy most of the time. So the grinding doesn't IMHO come from the actual raiding per se, but from the grind to keep the guild intact to finish all the content.
Of course, players are more skilled now and there is a repository of info available, but conversely, getting that amount of people together is much harder as time attention spans are so limited these days.
Rep Grinding
Ugh. This is the worst, and I mean that in every possible way. Rep grinding is an essential part of Vanilla WoW. The easier ones are faction/race based such as getting to exalted for your race as this reduced say. your epic mount costs by a huge whack. Then some people think that they don't like their goat/mechanical chicken/horse mount and want the cool cat one instead. So now they have to go back and 'level' up all again in Elfland to get their rep up to a satisfactory level including all the cloth donations.
Peanuts.
For some professions it's necessary to get exalted to get those last few precious recipes/patterns or items. Take Timbermaw/Darkmoon Fair/Argent Dawn for example. Even then, it will depend on how the timelines run on the servers as most implement these according to their own agendas and are usually dependent on specific events to occur before being implemented.
Then we have raid factions like Hydraxion Warlords necessary for Molton Core and.....
Is this the worst?
PvP rep grinding. I think someone said to become Grand Marshall/High Overlord you needed to be doing hardcore PvP for about 6 months on a well-developed server...and have a team dedicated to help you out.
So yeah, basically APART from the normal grind it takes to get to L60, then max your professions, then farm (aka grind) for your consumables there is still an enormous amount of grinding that can be done, or worse still, has to be done to get places in the game that you want to go to. It takes a *special* person to achieve all this, or an idiot, or perhaps both.
Level Weapon skills
So this is what happens when a fantastic epic drop comes to you either by complete accident or a designated drop. This weapon is just so much better than anything you have ever had that you really should be using it, except you never did level up dagger/swords/TH maces etc so off you go back to basic land and beat up a huge amount of low-level vermin to get you back up to speed until of course the next *different* weapon drops....
*So there it is my 'outstanding' guide to grinding with my own personal flavour which I reserve the right to edit and/or change my mind based on the comments that follow. In truth I am a very good farmer, having that ability to just switch off for days doing rinse and repeat with getting bored = I am a mindless zombie. In my forthcoming iteration I intend to explore more of the raiding elements.

Hello Crestfallen!
Because we all know there'll be a demand of AddOns, I'll be writing and updating a compilation of AddOns here. Posts for future expansions are also going to happen.
Do you have suggestions of useful AddOns? Do you have an actual compilation? Anything goes and I'll be maintaining this. Also, if you feel some AddOn shouldn't be on this list, or is outdated, let me know and I'll update it.
As always, discussions are something I'd want to hear regarding addons. What should we have listed here and what not. I'll be categorizing and sorting by name so the list will look neater.
If an AddOn is not listed and you wish to find one, you can google with:
<addon name> wow vanilla 1.12.1
and you're likely to find something useful. Curse and Curseforge are good websites to find AddOns for older WoW versions.
Note: If the AddOn is offline, please upload it to either MediaFire, Google Drive or Mega.co.nz - Or PM me and I will mirror it from my host.

I thought I'd start a thread to discuss downranking spells as a Healing Priest.
I'm in no way an expert on this topic as I did a majority of my end game healing in BC and if I remember correctly that was around the time this entire topic became obsolete (or at least was heading that way). I'm personally curious as to some of the thought process behind downranking for certain situations and how a few players who are used to the mechanic get that accomplished.
So Downranking is essentially using a lower rank of a spell for mana efficiency or occassionally for a quicker cast (again I don't know if this is particularly applicable in terms of priest spells). If anyone has a better definition of such that would be helpful.
Currently I'm using click casting addons whereas in the past I used Healbot. I'm noticing issues with my setup (which might be better suited to ask in an addon thread) where Clique won't properly Downrank.
Calling all Vanilla healer pros for advice and help with the particulars of Downranking and how to actually implement those casts.

Hi,
I would like to introduce you to my AddOn 'CastModifier', which allows you to use Conditionals inside your /cast macros. This allows you to write some fairly advanced macros in a very compact manner, without the need to learn Lua! Here are some examples:
A list of every available Conditional, including its parameters, extra remarks, and a how-to-install tutorial can be found on the AddOn's Github page.
Github Page
While I've been using this AddOn for almost a year now, it might still be somewhat buggy since I'm pretty much the only person that has used it so far. Therefore I'd greatly appreciate any feedback from you guys. Also, I would be very grateful for any ideas for additional features that may improve this AddOn even further!
Cheers,
Ike

Hello.
A lot of you may know about this guy who clearly has a small chip on his shoulder about Kronos. I check up on his stats from time to time, have to say I consider them to be factual and accurate.
The latest stats are extremely worrying about Kronos, pre-merger.
Link is here
If Kronos throw in the towel (as I have no doubt that they consider the server to be a commercial entity and not a charity vehicle) then this would be a serious blow to the community.

Backport of UnitFramesImproved to Vanilla with some minor changes like option for dark mode and class portraits.
Now with automatic detection and compatibility if modUI is activated. MobHealth3 is now embedded into the addon!
Dont forget to remove "-master" at the end of the filename when you add it to your interface folder. https://github.com/Ko0z/UnitFramesImproved_Vanilla
COMMANDS: /ufi to see options.
With modUI compatiblility:
This addon is in beta and I would appreciate if you report any bugs you might find in the "Issues" section at Github

Greetings,
quite a while ago, a good friend of mine asked me to create an Addon that looks and feels similar to XLootGroup because the default roll frames were too big for him. This is what I've come up with and I'd like to share it with you too!
Screenshot:
You can drag the bottom most frame around (the others are "glued" to it) by typing "/smrf toggle move" in chat.
As always, you can find an up-to-date version of the Addon on my Github page: To Github
Feel free to send me your feedback!
Cheers,
Ike

Greetings,
I've been working on improving one of my favorite Addons ever, Align. While the default version is pretty helpful to place your frames in a very precise manner, I've always found it difficult to use when trying to do so in a more fine-grained way while using a high grid resolution. Additionally, I've always found it unnecessarily clunky the way you have to disable and re-enable the grid, in order to change its size. To help with that, I've implemented the ability to add what I very creatively call "helper bars". These are symmetrically mirrored lines (they come always in pairs of 2) that you can drag across your screen both horizontally and vertically. Combined with a more fine-grained way of changing the resolution of the default Align grid, this allows you to very easily sketch out where you want to place your UI elements.
TL;DR: watch this video where I very quickly set up some frames in my UI using BetterAlign:
Download from Github
I hope this helps you out!
Cheers,
Ike

Hello.
So this is about our Progression Through Expansions (PTE) format for Crestfall. Not one for doing things for no reason we started a poll on this about a week ago. You can find the results here:
In this poll we asked a simple question, and we deliberately limited choices. Our poll attracted 139 votes. Lest people complain that 139 is not a decent representative of the members I'll remind you that at that time, we only had 545 members who actively posted on these forums. Therefore 139 represents 25% of potential voters. This is the equivalent of asking 16m people what party they would vote for in the UK for example. So from my point of view, while the percentages would change if everyone voted, they would in no way affect the final outcome. Which is this:
Hmmm. Bit blurry, nevermind.
So here's the critical thing, based on these numbers, only 5.8% of members would stay on the Vanilla realm once TBC becomes available.
Let's put that into context. The devs have said that they are happy to run a TBC and Vanilla realm as long as the numbers work out. For the numbers to work out, and this applies to PvE or PvP realms, my estimation is that you would need a 50/50 split on a realm where the max population on at any one time is about 4000. My thinking on this is that if 2000 head off to TBC, and 2000 stay in Vanilla, leaving us in an ideal world where you would have 1000 toons on either faction at peak time on both TBC/Vanilla realms.
As per the FAQ:
Q. How are you going to handle progressing from Vanilla to TBC? And how far are you going to go?
A. Our current plan is to open a new PvP TBC realm and allow characters to transfer from the PvP Vanilla realm if they choose to. We expect that the number of interested players will be sufficient to keep both the Vanilla and TBC realms healthy. In the case of the PvE realm, the current plan is to directly upgrade it to a TBC realm, so there will be no PvE Vanilla after the TBC upgrade. The reason for this is that our current estimates suggest that splitting the population in that case would leave not enough people in either realm for it to be successful. If the PvE population is larger than we expected, then we can treat that and the PvP server in the same fashion.
Well these votes kill that stone dead. Even allowing for a buffered delay as people transfer their accounts/characters over time, this 5.8% would mean that the sum total peak population on the vanilla would end up being 232. The other 3768 will happily be playing TBC.
On this basis, as per what the devs have said, the vanilla realm will be mothballed after ~18 months with all characters transferred into the TBC version.
Annnnnnnnnndddd it doesn't get much better for TBC. Once the TBC content is exhausted then the total number of players left on the realm - even if we generously include the orphan vanilla players - will only amount to around 990 players at peak. Again, not in anyway a viable number of players.
Realistically, the only realm that stands a chance of being viable would be the WotLK version assuming we progress to Cataclysm. The max pop if we include the vanilla + TBC players would be close to 70% of the player base or 2800.
The great pity about all this is players that find out about Crestfall late in the day. Let's say end 2017 (or 2031) you hear about Crestfall and log on only to find that the realm has only got 4-6 months left before you are forced into TBC. That would be a damn shame. It would also be a damn shame if the fabulously scripted and working vanilla realm was mothballed instead of being admired as a work of art.
And there the matter would have remained except for this thread here by @Xadas
So during the day we've had a back and forwards discussion with Darkrasp and for me anyway, the goalposts have changed slightly. I have to say I was pretty confused/stupid with this until @DeeMarie and @Chickengrease cleared it up for me. The salient point is Darkrasp's comment here:
So here is what I think will happen:
A1: You play Vanilla on the 1.12.1 client, much fun is had and you create multiple characters
A2: After ~16-18 months The Burning Crusade comes along
A3: You can decide which characters get transferred over to the TBC realm and which ones stay.
A4: If you log onto the 1.12.1 client the characters you specified to stay remain there to be played.
B1: When you log onto the 2.4.3 client the characters that you wanted to transfer will be on that TBC realm
B2: As Darkrasp said, if you don't transfer your character over you have the risk that someone will take that name (although you can always leave a placeholder)
This means that the avatar idea I proposed is trashed in my opinion. You can always leave a L60 or whatever on the vanilla realm if you want to play there.
It also means that the population figures I spent a lot of time getting are not as relevant as they seem. It's perfectly reasonable to expect that people will continue to play on both realms. However, such is the dearth of players wanting to remain on vanilla I still think that both PvE and PvP realms will be mothballed as some point after TBC is released. 5.8% just doesn't work for me.
Right. That's it I think. I reserve the right to be completely wrong and look forward to any gentle corrections.

Greetings.
This specific question has not been asked as a poll. We have talked about it in this thread by @Lily here:
And it's cropping up on this thread here:
As a by product. So just to be clear (and I'll edit this if necessary). There will be two realms at launch: PvE or Zul'Dare and PvP or Kul'Tiras. There may be more upon demand but this is not relevant.
What is relevant is that the server will be PTE or Progression Through Expansions. That is, after an undefined period of time (but generally agreed to be 16-18 months), one of two things will happen:
Option 1: If the realm you are on has a healthy population (not defined but assumed to be 5000 peak online at one time) then another realm will be made available for The Burning Crusade expansion. You can then CHOOSE to remain in the Kul'Tiras vanilla realm for as long as you like or.............transfer to the TBC server.
Option 2: If the realm you are on has a low population (not defined but assumed to be less than 2500 peak online at one time) then this realm will progress to The Burning Crusade whether you like it or not. Vanilla will cease to exist for all your associated toons.
Caveats:
Option 2 can apply to the PvE or PvP realms or both. It is population based only.
The devs may allow you to character transfer from PvP to PvE and vice versa and therefore from vanilla to vanilla or vanilla to TBC or any other combination. This may not happen. This may require a payment normally defined as 'a contribution to our running costs'
That this process will occur yet again once TBC content is exhausted (at an agreed timeline) and we progress to Wrath of the Lich King.
That this process will PROBABLY occur once again for Cataclysm but this is not guaranteed and it's a long way off
Therefore:
It is reasonable to put a poll to the members so that all of us (including the devs) get an early idea where people would like to halt progression.
That whatever people vote on it's just a snapshot in time and people may change their minds, so people quoting this thread and results when we are in TBC should start another poll.
That as the players will be spending days/weeks/months of their lives happily playing in Crestfall realms it's only fair that we should have some idea what the end result will be.
For the poll I have NOT included any expansion specifically past Cata other than an option for further expansions as a general option
I have also added in an avatar option. To explain, this would happen if you went from vanilla to TBC but wanted to leave an avatar behind so you could still play vanilla. Or, this would allow the devs to do a proper split as effectively you are keeping some of the population behind. This is my own personal wish list so please vote down if you don't like it.
Finally:
I would kindly ask people not to post the obvious here. That is, it's not helpful to say 'I'm staying in vanilla' that's what the poll is for. Comments should be addressed to the functionality of PTE in terms of how it may work as a mechanism. So for example, what the numbers should be to allow for a realm to spilt to vanilla + TBC rather than just progress automatically.
Please note voter names are public for validity reasons
That's about it. Please vote. If you don't vote, don't bitch.

So, I am thinking about rolling a Hunter here on Crestfall simply because I love the gameplay of the class. Hunters are, in my opinion, fun in every patch of every expansion/game version. Maybe not the best, but always enjoyable. I love using a bow or a gun to shoot at my enemies safe from the distance while my loyal beast protects me from harm while also causing serious injuries to my enemies.
What I really love about the Hunter class is the ability to have pets. Loyal companions who would take a bullet for you and who obeys your every command. I want all kinds of beastly friends to follow me on my adventurous journey to greatness. Raptors, cats, bears, birds, pigs, crocodiles, turtles. I'm a ''gotta catch em all'' kind of guy. Which brings me to the point and question of this topic.
From what I've heard from rumours and different sources, in vanilla pets are very ''meta''. There are some pets who are pretty much useless and a couple of ''special'' rares who are a must if you want the most damage output, because they just do SO much more damage than other normal pets. Or that one rare Raptor that has double the speed of any other pet. Which in my opinion is very boring. Of course I want a pet that dishes out an incredible amount of damage, but I don't want it to be because it is that one rare mob from that place that every Hunter has to have. Maybe I want a little piggy I found at lvl 10 to be my best friend and brother in arms as we charge to battle Blackwing Lair. Or that one disgusting spider I know my enemies fear, but I love.
My question is. How is the pet situation in vanilla? Can I use whatever pet I want and still compete with the ''meta'' pets or are there only very few alternatives if you want to be a realisticly good Hunter? Like will some type of beasts always be terrible in most scenarious and some type of beast or creature always perform the best?
Cheers

Obvious question of course. It should be pointed out that perspective between PvE and PvP realms will make a considerable difference (STV/Hillsbrad I am looking at you), not to mention faction.
For the record, here are my favourite and hated zones:
+
Teldrassil: So the first time I played WoW I ran up a Night Elf Priest. For most people, their original vanilla starting zone will remain as a favourite based on 24 slot bags of nostalgia. But Teldrassil is better than that. First of all it's one of the better starting zones with an excellent variety of quests, locations and elites. Secondly, and probably most importantly of all, there is the music. Running from Dolannar to Darnassus having that glorious, evocative music in your head stays with you for decades. An all-time favourite.
Duskwood: The most atmospheric zone in the game. Has the best quest lines (Legend of Stalvan), brilliant elites (Mor'Ladim 26 - 7 Outstanding) (Kiteable Stitches), fantastic mobs (Worgen - so good they made it into a PC class), hidden surprises (Twilight Grove) and a great grinding area as well.
STV: There is just soooo much to do there and over 10+ levels too. You can dip into it as you like and come back to complete quests at a better time. Booty Bay is a great town by itself with a lot of fun NPC's. It's probably the first time that you feel you are going places level-wise and building momentum. It's also the first zone where I start making decent money by.........
-
Darkshore: Oh dear God this is the reverse of Teldrassil. It's just one very long walk. If you don't know what you're doing and wander off into the forests at L10 you will be massacred over and over again. The Spirit Healer location sucks. The whole atmosphere is completely depressing. The music suck. It's just awful, alright, and we still do it.
Desolace: Apart from doing a few handy quests, the SM starter quest, the flight path and fishing for The Big Iron Fishing Pole the sooner I leave here the better.
Silithus: Killing billions of creepy crawlies in their nests is not appealing in the slightest. It's too big, it's unappealing, the quests are naff and the only thing going for it is AQ and that's months away. Pass me the sick bag.

What are some of your favorite memories from retail vanilla way back in the day. They can be anything from getting some nice items or just fishing with your guild anyhting really.
Mine is probably just coming home from school and playing with the long gone rogue 'emelious' who i would quest with for hours and during that time my parents fabreezed the house, so whenever I smell that fabreeze it brings me back to my time with emelious creating characters noodling around in WoW

The second in an occasional series....
On the 13th September 2007, Blizzard released patch 1.7 which included many things of note, the Arathi Basin Battleground, an increase from 8 to 16 for the debuff limit, the Stranglethorn Fishing contest (yah!), the Druid class review and of course a new, 20 person raid in Zul'Gurrub which included Hakkar the Soulflayer. Now Hakkar had a debuff called corrupted blood, a highly contagious disease that did 875-1125 damage to the initial target and 200 damage every 2 secs for a total of 10 secs to said target and nearby enemies. In addition there was a percentage chance that the disease would spread to anyone within target range.
The disease would eventually dissipate when either the character died or as time passed or of course, Hakkar was killed. It was intended as a raid only debuff and there the matter would have ended.
Unfortunately or fortunately, there was a bug in the script that allowed Warlock or Hunter pets contaminated with the disease to bring it outside of the instance. Initially by accident, and then more or less deliberately, the disease was brought from Zul'Gurrub to be inflicted on players in highly populated areas. What made it worse was that NPC's could be afflicted by the disease, were immune to its effects, but acted as carriers.
The effects of the plague, particularly amongst low-level characters was traumatic to say the least...
Players reacted in different ways. To start off with, there was clearly a small minority of high level toons that deliberately set about wiping and re-wiping most of the populations. There were also those that used their healing talents to try and reduce the effects. Some toons fled, or were resurrected and fled to low population areas. Some players logged off and only returned when safe to do so. In a very short period of time in a limited number of realms utter chaos reigned until Blizzard did a complete shutdown and rebooted the servers having initially failed to quarantine the event..
What's particularly interesting is the effect this plague had on the outside RL world. So for example, it was listed on the BBC website here
There's a PDF from the Lancet (top rated medical journal) on using MMO's as a comparison to real world epidemics here
And an epidemiologist wrote an article here to put everything into context.
Was anyone else around for this event? What version do you think the devs will do for Zul'Gurrub? Too good a chance to cause chaos?